Sebastian has studied Biotechnology at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, where he did his master thesis at the Institut für Biotechnologie und Wirkstoff-Forschung working on natural product discovery and protein expression. He obtained his degree in early 2015 and started his PhD studies at HIPS in the junior research group Structural Biology of Biosynthetic Enzymes in April 2015.

Sebastian is studying natural product biosynthesis with a focus on ribosomally produced and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs). This new class of natural products is a prime target for in vitro biosynthetic studies and contains many compounds with interesting biological activities.