Prof. Volkhard Helms has been Professor of Bioinformatics at the Center for Bioinformatics at the Saarland University since 2003 and is also a member of the CBI Saarland Directorate. He studied physics in Freiburg and Munich and obtained his PhD at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg in 1996. He then carried out posdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego, and went on to lead a research group in theoretical biophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. In 2001 he was selected as an EMBO Young Investigator. His research group headed applies numerical simulations, as well as statistical methods to study biomolecular interactions and control loops in cells.