Oliver Kayser is Full Professor at TU Dortmund University for Technical Biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. at the Free University Berlin, Germany, Pharmaceutical Biology, where he worked on the phytochemistry and pharmacology and natural product chemistry, pharmaceutical biotechnology and in vitro and in vivo testing. Afterwards, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry focusing on drug discovery of secondary metabolites from plants and microorganisms. He was appointed at the University of Groningen in 2003 as Associated Professor for Natural Product Biosynthesis and he studied the biosynthesis of cannabinoids and artemisinin. In 2010 he took over the chair of Technical Biochemistry and focussed on plant biotechnology, plant genetics, metabolomics, and endophytes to understand and assemble the cannabinoid pathway in a recombinant host. His work can be characterized by protein engineering, synthetic biology and systems biotechnology.  He has chaired and co-organized several scientific conferences, he is the founder of the European Association of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (EAPB), was vice president of the Society of medicinal plants and natural product research (GA), and is Editor in Chief of Planta Medica. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed papers, 21 book chapters, 9 books, 4 patents and he holds a visiting professorship at the Medical University of Poznan, Poland, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2017.