Holger Puchta is director of the Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter Institute for Plant Sciences at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. After his study of biochemistry at the universities of Tübingen and Munich and his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich he joined the laboratory of Barbara Hohn at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland before he became in 1995 group leader at the Leibnitz Institute for Plant Genetics in Gatersleben (IPK), Germany. In 2000 he habilitated at the University Halle in Genetics. He was worldwide the first scientist to demonstrate that site-specific nucleases can be applied to induce controlled changes in plant genomes and one of leading scientists adopting the CRISPR/Cas technology to plants. His group elucidate major pathways of DNA repair in plant cells. Recently his group established CRISPR/Cas mediated plant chromosome engineering. He was named “Pioneer of Plant Biotechnology” by the Plant Biotechnology Journal and was awarded twice with an advanced grant of the European Research Council and most recently with the Reinhard Koselleck excellence funding of the German Research Foundation. He is elected member of the German and the European Academy of Science.