Zoltán Ivics received his PhD in molecular biology in 1994. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Minnesota in the USA and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, he was appointed as a research group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany. He was appointed as Head of Division at the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Langen, Germany, in 2011. He took up a professorship at the University of Leipzig and leadership of the Department of Clinical Gene Transfer at Fraunhofer IZI in Leipzig in 2024. Prof. Ivics’ major scientific achievement is the molecular reconstruction of the Sleeping Beauty transposon and development of technologies based on Sleeping Beauty gene transfer for a wide array of applications involving genetic engineering of cells. Prof. Ivics has published >190 papers in peer reviewed journals, with a total Impact Factor of >1200 and >8000 citations (h-index: 73 by Google Scholar), and is co-inventor on 12 issued patents. Since 2000 his research efforts were supported by 25 research grants from the German Research Foundation, the German Ministry of Education and Research, the European Commission, the Volkswagen Foundation, the German Cancer Aid and the German Consortium for Translational Cancer Research. He received recognition of the “Molecule of the Year” in 2009 for developing a hyperactive Sleeping Beautytransposase that opened the door for clinical applications. He is the current president of the German Society of Gene Therapy. He served as a member of the Board of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT) between 2012 and 2022 and has been a member of the committee for “Clinical trials and regulatory affairs” of the German Stem Cell Network since 2015. Prof. Ivics organized and chaired several international conferences, including the Annual Congress of the ESGCT in Berlin in 2017. He is an Elected Member of the Academia Europaea and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His current interests focus on establishing clinically relevant methods and protocols for non-viral gene therapy.