Sascha Martens is a professor of membrane biochemistry at the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna. He obtained his PhD in genetics at the University of Cologne, Germany with the immunologist Jonathan Howard, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Harvey McMahon at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He became an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in 2009. In 2017, he was promoted to a full professor and since 2020 he has served as a vice dean of the Max Perutz Labs. In 2020, he was elected an EMBO member. He is a world-class expert in the reconstitution of both yeast and human autophagy machineries and his lab is also set to conduct cell biology studies to investigate the role of mitophagy in cells, including neurons derived from stem cells, for its relevance in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.