Prof. Dr. Ir. Stein Aerts is heading the Laboratory of Computational Biology at the University of Leuven. His lab studies the regulatory genome in development and cancer through integrative genomics, combining high-throughput experiments, next-generation sequencing, genetics, and bioinformatics. Stein performed undergraduate research at the Center for Genomic Sciences in Cuernavaca, Mexico and then moved to industry where he worked for two years as bioinformatician at Johnson&Johnson and Data4S Future Technologies. He returned to academia in 2001 and obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Leuven in 2004. He subsequently received postdoctoral training on fruit fly genetics in the Bassem Hassan lab at the VIB and on gene networks in the lab of Denis Thieffry at the Institute for Developmental Biology (IBDML) in Marseille-Luminy. He became Assistant Professor at the University of Leuven in 2009. Stein was awarded a HFSP Young Investigator Grant in 2010 and he is a Junior European Drosophila Investigator (JEDI).