Rainer Blatt studied physics and received his PhD at the University of Mainz. As postdoctoral fellow, he worked on laser cooling of atomic beams with John L. Hall (Nobelpreis 2005) in Boulder (USA) and as a research assistant at the University of Hamburg with P. Toschek he worked with single trapped ions. In 1994, he became professor of physics at the University of Göttingen and in 1995, he accepted a chair position at the Institut f. Experimentalphysik of the University of Innsbruck, where he works with trapped ions in Paul-traps for quantum computers, quantum simulations and quantum metrology. Since 2003 he is research director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Innsbruck. R. Blatt is co-founder of Alpine Quantum Technologies GmbH (AQT) in Innsbruck, a company developing commercial quantum computers. Since 2021, R. Blatt is the scientific manager and coordinator of the Munich Quantum Valley. For his quantum information research, he received the Schrödinger-Prize of the ÖAW in 2006, the Stern-Gerlach medal of the German Physical Society (DPG) in 2012, the John-Stewart-Bell prize of CQIQC (Toronto) in 2015 and the Micius Quantum Prize 2018. R. Blatt is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.