His research seeks to make it easier to engineer and program multicellular biological systems, circuits, and devices in order to foster the human condition. It is his vision that micro-biological systems are as constructible, interactive, programmable, accessible, and useful as current electronic devices. He runs an interdisciplinary lab integrating diverse areas like synthetic biology, biophysics, human-computer interaction design, embedded cyber-physical systems, modeling, education, and games. He received his Diploma in theoretical solid-state physics at the Technical University Dresden, did his PhD in experimental biophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, followed by a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology.