Dr. Andreas Diepold earned his PhD in Biochemistry and Microbiology from University of Basel in Switzerland in 2010. He completed his post-doc with the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford in 2016. Since 2017, he has been leading a research group as a Microbiologist at the Department of Ecophysiology the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology. His research group studies bacterial secretion systems, which are often important virulence factors. They aim to explore how these systems work on the molecular level, how they are controlled by external signals such as contact with host cells 鈥� and how to utilize them in the biotech and healthcare fields. He is fascinated by the great potential of optogenetics, especially post-translational optogenetics, to study and control secretion systems and bacterial processes in general.