Dr. Robert Kourist is full Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and head of the institute with the same name at Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria and Leader of the Area Biotransformation at the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology.  He received his diploma in biochemistry from the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 2006. After obtaining his PhD in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Uwe Bornscheuer at the University of Greifswald, he went for one year as postdoctoral fellow to the laboratory of Prof. Kenji Miyamoto at the Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. In 2009, he received the DSM Science and Technology Award North and a 1^st prize in the VentureCup Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In 2015, he was appointed member of the Young College of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Northrhine Westphalia. From 2012 to 2016, he was Junior Professor for Microbial Biotechnology at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Dr. Kourist’s expertise lies in the field of biocatalysis with a special focus on the development of chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions and light-catalyzed redoxreactions. He has co-authored more than 100 publications and patents and has an H-index of 30 (google scholar).