Reinhard Lipowsky is director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces for which he was one of the founding directors. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, has honorary professorships at the University of Potsdam and at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and is a fellow of the Max Planck School "Matter to Life". His expertise covers a wide range of topics in chemical and biological physics, which he studies by a combination of analytical theory, computer simulations, and experimental methods. His main achievements are in the areas of interfacial phase transitions and wetting phenomena, biomembranes and vesicles, as well as molecular motors and nanomachines. Recently, his focus is on remodeling processes in the context of bottom-up synthetic biology.