Prof. Dr. Dirk Grimm has contributed to and shaped human gene therapy using viral vectors for >25 years, including his doctoral and postdoctoral work with Prof. Jürgen Kleinschmidt (DKFZ Heidelberg, 1995-2001) followed by a 6-year training in the lab of gene therapy pioneer Prof. Mark Kay at Stanford University (USA). Since 2007, he heads the interdisciplinary research group “Virus-Host Interactions” at BioQuant that develops and applies stateof-the-art viral vector technologies (also the title of his professorship; W2 since 2017, W3 since 2022).