Yaowen Wu received his BS in Chemistry from Sun Yat-sen University in 2001 and his MS in Organic Chemistry from Tsinghua University in 2004 in China. After graduating as Dr rer. nat. (2008) at the Technische Universität Dortmund working at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund Germany and a postdoctoral study in cell biology at King’s College London, he has been leader of an Otto Hahn group at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund since 2010. Since 2012, he has been group leader of Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society. He was then appointed as Professor in Biochemistry at the Umeå University in 2018. His research group develops small molecules and new chemical methods to modify proteins or manipulate protein function in the context of biological systems with a particular focus on regulatory mechanisms in membrane trafficking and autophagy. He has received awards and honors including Göran Gustafsson Prize in Molecular Biology, “Future of Biochemistry”, Wallenberg Academy Fellow (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), European Research Council (ERC) grant, Behrens-Weise Award, Biomedicine Research Prize and Otto-Hahn Award.