Prof. Peter Fratzl is an Austrian physicist and Director of the Department of Biomaterials at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam. He graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1980 and received his PhD in physics from the University of Vienna in 1983, followed by a Habilitation in solid-state physics in 1991. He is a leading scholar in biological and bio-inspired materials science, studying how the hierarchical structure of natural materials — such as wood, bone, mollusk shells, glass sponges, and protein fibers — determines their physical properties. His work has provided materials scientists with new concepts for material design and has profoundly influenced medically oriented research on osteoporosis and bone regeneration. He is Co-Director of the Max Planck Queensland Centre for the Materials Science of Extracellular Matrices and spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt University Berlin. His awards include the Max Planck Research Award (2008) and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (2010). He was elected a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering acatech (2013), the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2015), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2020), and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2025). He has authored or co-authored about 500 publications and is listed as a highly cited researcher.