Paul Wilmes is Full Professor of Systems Ecology and holds appointments at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine and in the Department of Life Sciences and Medicine within the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine of the University of Luxembourg. Paul earned his PhD from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2006, a part of his doctoral research having been performed at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen (Germany). He subsequently carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) from where he returned in 2010 to his native Luxembourg through the ATTRACT fellowship scheme of the National Research Fund. In 2019, Paul received an European Research Council Consolidator Grant for his project “ExpoBiome”. During COVID-19, Paul led national efforts in managing the pandemic. He has won numerous awards and prizes for his scientific work.