Cyril Zipfel is the Chair of Molecular & Cellular Plant Physiology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) (since June 2018). Before that, he was Senior Group Leader and Head of The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) in Norwich (UK) where he had his group since 2007. He performed his doctoral (2001-2005) and post-doctoral research (2005-2007) in the laboratories of Profs. Thomas Boller (Friedrich-Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland) and Jonathan Jones (TSL Norwich, UK) (supported by an EMBO Long-Term Post-Doctoral Fellowship), respectively. He is a pioneer and leader in the field of plant innate immunity and receptor kinases. His work is focused on understanding the molecular basis of plant innate immunity mediated by surface-localized immune receptors, as well as the application of this research to engineer disease resistance in crops. He was awarded competitive European Research Council grants in 2012 and 2018, is a Highly Cited Researcher (since 2014), and was awarded Charles Albert Shull Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2015 and the 4th Tsuneko & Reiji Okazaki Award from Nagoya University in 2018. He was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2018.