Ralf Reski

Ralf Reski studied Biology, Chemistry and Pedagogy. In 1990 he was awarded his doctorate in Genetics and became Assistant Professor in Cell Biology. In 1994 he received his Habilitation in General Botany. From 1996 until 1999 Reski was a Heisenberg-Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). After offers from within Germany and abroad he became Distinguished Professor in Freiburg and headed the newly established Department of Plant Biotechnology. In 1999 he was co-founder of the company greenovation Biotech GmbH. Reski is Founding PI of the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM), the Centre for Biological Signalling Studies (BIOSS) and the Freiburg Initiative for Systems Biology (FRISYS). Since 2004 he is affiliated Professor at the Ecole supérieur de Biotechnologie Strasbourg (ESBS). Ralf Reski has served on several advisory boards; e.g. from 2007 until 2010 as a member of the Think Tank on Innovation Policy (Innovationsrat) headed by Günther Oettinger, then State Premier of Baden-Württemberg and now European Commissioner. In 2011 he became FRIAS Senior Fellow, was co-founder of the Trinational Institute for Plant Research (TIP) and was awarded a life-time membership in the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAW). With more than 180 scientific publications Ralf Reski has helped to establish the moss Physcomitrella patens as a flagship model organism on a world-wide scale.

As part of his Fellowship, Ralf Reski is working on the project Evolution of the plant phenolic metabolism: a search for new strategies to improve biofuel production, together with his collaborator Danièle Werck-Reichhart.