Prof Roland Wohlgemuth is the Chairman of the European Society of Applied Biocatalysis, President of the Swiss Coordination Committee for Biotechnology and Professor at Lodz University of Technology. He studied chemistry and biology at the University of Basel in Switzerland and obtained his Ph.D. at the Biocenter of the same university in 1979 working with Prof. Seelig on fundamental aspects of the structure and function of biological cell membranes. From 1980 to 1983 he moved to the University of California in Berkeley and did postdoctoral work on artificial photosynthesis with Prof. Melvin Calvin at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and at UC Berkeley with a Swiss National Science Foundation Award followed by a two-year employment by the US Department of Energy. In 1983 Roland Wohlgemuth moved back to Buchs in Switzerland, where he built up biochemistry/biotechnology in a chemical company Fluka, which in 1989 became part of the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, which then in November 2015 became member of the Merck Group. His main interests are at the molecular and engineering interface of medicine-biology-chemistry, biocatalysis, glycobiology, metabolomics, protein analysis, bioanalytical technologies, industrial biotechnology and bioeconomy.