Henrike Niederholtmeyer is a professor at the Technical University of Munich. Here, at the Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability, she leads a research group in the field of cell-free synthetic biology. Until moving to TUM in 2022, she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Dr. Niederholtmeyer obtained a PhD in bioengineering from EPFL in 2015, using microfluidics and cell-free transcription and translation to characterize oscillating gene networks in the lab of Sebastian Maerkl. From 2015 to 2020 she was a postdoc at UCSD, at the department for Chemistry and Biochemistry in Neal Devaraj’s lab, where she got excited about engineering synthetic compartments. Now, her research focuses on rapid prototyping of parts and genetic networks in cell-free systems and on building life-like systems, in particular spatial organization, from scratch.