Regine Hengge studied Biology at the University of Konstanz, where she also obtained her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Winfried Boos with a thesis on protein secretion of periplasmic proteins in E.coli. She then worked on signal transduction in the RAS pathway in yeast as a postdoc in Prof. Dr. Jim Broach's group at Princeton University (NJ, USA) . In 1989, back at the University of Konstanz, she started her own group and since then has worked on biofilm formation and the molecular biology of bacterial stress responses, in particular in stationary phase. In 1994, she became a Privatdozent (“Habilitation“ in microbiology and molecular genetics), and in 1998 she became a Full Professor of Microbiology at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2002, she was offered the Microbiology Chair at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, which she declined. Regine Hengge received a number of research awards, including the “Landesforschungspreis Baden-Württemberg“ (1996), the „Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis“ from the DFG (1998), and an ERC Advanced Researcher Grant (2010). She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (since 2000), the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (since 2001), the European Organisation of Molecular Biology (EMBO, since 2003), the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM, since 2009), and the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM, since 2012). She accepted the posioion of Microbiology Chair at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, beginning work there on Sept. 1, 2013.