Bart Deplancke graduated as a Biochemical Engineer at Ghent University (Belgium, 1998) after which he pursued doctoral studies in Immunobiology at the University of Illinois (USA) and postdoctoral work in regulatory genomics at the Harvard and UMass Medical Schools (USA). In 2007, he established his lab at the EPFL School of Life Sciences where he is now a Full Professor and former Vice-Dean of Innovation. There, he is developing new, often single cell-related technologies to study how the genome mediates cellular and organismal phenotypic diversity, especially in a metabolic context, resulting in >150 peer-reviewed publications to date in well-recognized peer-reviewed journals. These efforts led for example to the discovery of a new anti-adipogenic stromal cell type (Schwalie et al., Nature, 2018); a new genomic concept, chromatin modules, that rationalize gene regulation in 3D (Waszak et al., Cell, 2015); as well as the development of a live cell transcriptomic profiling approach (Live-seq; Chen et al, Nature, 2022). In 2013, he became a Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Group Leader; in 2017, he was elected to the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); in 2021, he received the Cloëtta Prize for outstanding contributions to biomedical research; in 2022, the Leenaards Prize for Biomedical Translational Research as well as an SNSF Advanced Grant (ERC equivalent); in 2023, he was awarded EMBO membership; and in 2026 the International Francqui Professor Chair prize. He is also the co-founder of two Biotech companies (Genohm, Acquired by Agilent in 2018; and Alithea Genomics).