Peer Schenk is Professor for Plant and Microbial Biotechnology in the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia and heads the Algae Biotechnology Laboratory at UQ since 2004. Prior to that, he completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in 1994 and has since been Project and Program Leader in four Cooperative Research Centres that promote collaboration between industry and academia. Prof. Schenk discovered and commercialised fundamental new concepts and technology from Plant-Microbe Interactions, Algal Biotechnology and Water Purification, leading to several start-up companies in these areas. He was Australia’s APEC representative for biorefinery concepts and produced plant varieties that are now commercially grown in three continents. His team established the UQ Algae Energy Farm in 2013, a large-scale algae farm that develops and demonstrates new cost-saving technologies to produce food, feed, nutraceuticals and biofuel from algae.