Anthony Hyman is Director and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.In 1984 he received his BSc first class in Zoology from the University College in London, where he had also been working as research Assistant in 1981.From 1985 to 1987 he wrote his Ph.D. about, “The establishment of division axes in early C. elegans embryos” under the supervision of John White at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC in Cambridge, England. After that he moved to San Francisco where he did his postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Tim Mitchison at the University of California, investigating the mechanism of chromosome movement studied in vitro. In 1993 he became Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, before he moved to Dresden in 1999 as one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. In 2002 he was named honorary Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the Technical University Dresden. The year after he was awarded the EMBO Gold Medal. In 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded the Leibniz Prize in 2011. From July 2011 to June 2013 he had been Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.His research covers the mitotic spindle assembly and function, focusing on centrosomes, distribution of force generating mechanisms necessary for the first asymmetric division, and establishment of cortical polarity. He primarily works in C. elegans embryos, but is also studying aspects of these problems in human cells using the emerging techniques of BAC transgenesis.