Berthold Göttgens is Professor of Molecular Haematology at the University of Cambridge. He has built an internationally leading research programme studying transcriptional control mechanisms in normal blood stem cells and how dysregulated transcription causes leukaemia. He was one of the first researchers to use long-range genomic comparisons to pinpoint important gene regulatory sequences and with subsequent functional studies provided the first molecular characterisation of a blood stem cell enhancer. More recently, he has employed genome-wide mapping techniques, single cell gene expression profiling and state of the art in vivo assays to build the most advanced regulatory network models for blood stem cells to date.