Stephan Grill was born in 1974 in Heidelberg and studied physics at the University of Heidelberg. He received his PhD from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and the University of Munich. He did his postdoctoral work first at MPI-CBG from 2002- 2003, and then continued at the University of Berkeley (USA) as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow until 2005. Stephan Grill returned to Dresden in 2006, where he worked jointly at MPI-CBG and the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden as a junior research group leader. He earned his habilitation in Theoretical Physics from the University of Leipzig in 2013, and was a Professor of Biophysics  at the Biotechnology Center of the Technische Universität Dresden from 2013 to 2019. He was an editor of the journal Physical Review Letters from 2014 to 2019. He was founding speaker of the new Cluster of Excellence “Physics of Life” at the TU Dresden from 2018-2021, and became a director at the MPI-CBG in October 2018 where he and his group work to reveal physical concepts and principles that underly the dynamic self-organization of living matter. He has received a number of awards including the 2011 Paul Ehrlich- und Ludwig Darmstaedter-Nachwuchspreis and the 2015 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics.