Prof. Dr. Roland Benz studied mathematics, chemistry, and physics at the University of Würzburg. In 1972, he obtained his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and he obtained his Habilitation in Biophysics in 1977. He is a Heisenberg Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Science Foundation). He was a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNYSB) in 1980 and 1982. In 1984, he was a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 1986, He became a full professor of biotechnology at the University of Würzburg, his alma mater. Since 2003, he has been a Member of the European Graduate College and, since 2005, a Member of the French–German Graduate College, both sponsored by the DFG. Since 2009, he has held the Wisdom Professorship at the Jacobs University Bremen and has been a research fellow and senior professor at the Rudolf Virchow Center and the DFG Research Center for Experimental Biomedicine. He remains a professor at the University of Würzburg. His research interests include the periplasmic structure and organization of cell membranes and other biological membranes, biophysical processes and the molecular basis of membrane proteins in microorganisms and higher organisms, and pore-forming peptides and proteins.