Stefan Schoenfelder studied molecular and cell biology at the University of Heidelberg, where he also did his PhD research in Renato Paro’s laboratory. In 2005, Schoenfelder joined Peter Fraser’s laboratory at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge where he worked on understanding how developmental gene expression programs are coordinated in space and time. During his time in the Fraser lab, Schoenfelder developed a ground-breaking technology to capture long-range regulatory chromatin contacts, such as those between enhancers and their target genes, on a genome-wide scale. In 2019, supported by a MRC Rutherford Fellowship with the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform, Schoenfelder established his independent research group at the Babraham Institute, where his team study how gene regulatory elements control cell fate decisions in human pluripotent stem cells. Schoenfelder currently shares his time between his academic position and his role as chief scientific advisor for Enhanced Genomics, a spinout he co-founded in 2020 based on chromosome conformation capture technology he developed.