Thomas Langer obtained his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. After a stay at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York working on chaperone-mediated protein folding, he established his independent group at the LMU Munich interested in mitochondrial protein quality control and neurodegenerative disorders. In 2002, he was appointed as professor at the University of Cologne and since 2018 as Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing in Cologne focusing on the analysis of mitochondrial proteostasis and its regulation in ageing and age-associated diseases.