Prof. Dr. Sven Apel holds the Chair of Software Product Lines at the University of Passau, Germany. The chair is funded by the esteemed Emmy-Noether and Heisenberg Programs of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Prof. Apel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. His research interests include novel programming paradigms, software engineering and product lines, and formal and empirical methods. He is the author or co-author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. Sven Apel is a member of the Young Academy of Europe and the IFIP Working Group 2.11 (Program Generation). He serves regularly in program committees of top-ranked international conferences, he is member of the editorial boards of IEEE Software and Empirical Software Engineering, and he will be program-committee co-chair of the 31st International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE). His work has received awards by the Ernst-Denert Foundation and the Karin-Witte Foundation.