1952 Born in Salzburg, Austria; Undergraduate studies in Biology in Freiburg, Germany

1978 PhD studies at University Zurich, Switzerland; Postdoctoral fellow at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

1986-1999 Professor at the University of California, San Francisco and Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute

1999-2004 Professor and Director of Gene Center, University of Munich, Germany

Since 2004 Director at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Freiburg, Germany