I was born in Magdeburg (East Germany) in 1955. In 1973, I finished secondary school with distinction. In 1975, I started to study Mathematics at TU Magdeburg, which I completed with distinction in 1980. In 1984, I defended my PhD thesis on scheduling problems with summa cum laude. In 1989, I defended my habilitation thesis at TU Magdeburg. For more than four decades, I mainly dealt with the exact and approximate solution to different types of scheduling problems, beginning in around 1980 with the development of genetic algorithms for the flow shop scheduling problem. I also dealt with complexity issues, scheduling problems under uncertainty, train scheduling problems, and various graph-theoretic problems. I was involved in several research projects supported by the German Research Society (DFG), the European community, (INTAS) and the Belarusian Republican Foundation of Fundamental Research. Since 2019, I am Editor-in-Chief of the journal Algorithms. I am an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Production Research, the Journal of Scheduling, and Operations Research and Decisions. I am also a member of the Editorial/Advisory Board of 14 further journals. I am the author or editor of more than 20 books and have published more than 350 papers. I was a guest editor of special issues for 10 international journals and a member of the program committee for more than 180 international conferences.