Peter Mombaerts was born in 1962 in Leuven, Belgium. He obtained his M.D. degree in 1987 at the Catholic University of Leuven. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1992 with a thesis on immunodeficient mice generated by gene targeting. As a postdoc with Dr. Richard Axel at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA (1993-1995), he developed a genetic approach to visualize axonal projections of mouse olfactory sensory neurons that express the same odorant receptor gene. From 1995-2007 he was faculty member at The Rockefeller University in New York, NY, USA. In 2008 he moved to Frankfurt as director of the newly created Department of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. In 2013 he became the director of the independent Max Planck Research Unit of Neurogenetics. He has authored 123 papers, which have been cited more than 17,000 times.