Professor Sonja Kleinlogel is a trained biochemist, with a long-standing track-record in optogenetics, gene therapy and neurophysiology. Sonja led the research group “Translational Optogenetics” at the University of Bern from 2012-2022 pioneering the fields of optogenetics and vision restoration by engineering light-sensitive designer proteins and retinal gene therapies and is heading the Neurotechnologies section in the Neurosciences and Rare Diseases department at Roche Pharma Research and Early Development with a personal focus on RNA-modifying technologies and gene therapies. She co-founded Arctos Medical AG in 2012, sold to Novartis 2021. Sonja is passionate about developing innovative technologies and bringing basic research to patients in need. Sonja Kleinlogel received her MSc degree at the University of Bern working on therapies for the restoration of hearing and completed her PhD studies at the Vision Touch and Hearing Research Centre of the University of Queensland (Australia) working on color and polarization vision. After a Postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt (Germany), one of the optogenetics founder labs, she was appointed at the University of Bern in 2012 and received tenure in 2018. In fall 2022 she joined Roche Pharma in Basel. Sonja Kleinlogel is committee member of the European “next-generation optogenetics” program and received several innovation prizes, such as the Theodor Kocher Prize, the Euretina Prize and the SwissOphth Award. She is married, mother of two children and lives with her family in the Bern area in Switzerland.