Stephan Riesenberg is a German biochemist and genome engineer known for developing practical solutions to some of the most persistent limitations of CRISPR-based technologies. He is a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he develops molecular strategies to control DNA repair outcomes and enable predictable genome modification for research and biomedical applications.
He earned his PhD in Biochemistry and later completed an MD-scientist degree at the University of Leipzig. Riesenberg was trained in two Nobel Prize-winning labs. He spent several years at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in the lab of Svante Pääbo, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022, where he worked at the interface of genome engineering, human evolution, and functional genomics. Earlier, he trained at the University of Copenhagen in the lab of Morten Meldal, recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, gaining a strong foundation in chemical biology and protein chemistry. This combination of genetics and chemistry continues to define his technology-driven approach to biology.