He was born and raised in Berlin, and did his undergraduate studies in environmental sciences at the Brandenburg Technical University. He entered medical school in 1994 at Humboldt University Charita in Berlin, Germany. In 1996, he began his MD/PhD training as a neurobiologist with Thomas Skutella (now in Heidelberg, Germany) and Robert Nitsch (now Mainz, Germany) at University Medical School Charit and joined the labs of Bernhard Maller and Friedrich Bonhoeffer at the MPI in Tuebingen (Germany) for establishing the stripe and outgrowth inhibition assays. After clinical training at the Neurology department with Arno Villringer (now MPI Leipzig, Germany), Charite, he joined Robert Nitsch as a postdoctoral fellow working on the identification of lesion-induced plasticity related genes in the brain. In 2004, he joined the laboratories of Nullin Divecha (now Manchester, UK) and Wouter Moolenaar at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam (Netherlands) working on signal transduction of these genes and on brain tumors in transgenic mice. A collaboration with the Schwab lab brought him to Zarich (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) where he founded his research group and laboratory. Since then, he started his clinical and research lab (now allocated at Erlangen, Germany) on the cell biology of brain cancer and their impact on microglia and immune system.