Philipp Donate studied pharmacy at Saarland University in Saarbrücken and graduated with a license to practice pharmacy in 2022. In 2021, he completed his master's thesis at HIPS in the Department of Microbial Natural Products of Prof. Dr. Rolf Müller and began his doctoral studies the following year, also in the Department of Microbial Natural Products.

Philipp is working on the identification and characterization of new bioactive secondary metabolites from myxobacteria as part of his PhD. Here, he focuses primarily on the development and optimization of alternative analytical methods for solid cultivation approaches in order to identify and visualize previously unrecognized secondary metabolites and to purify promising candidates and elucidate their structure using spectroscopic methods.