Wolfgang did his undergraduate studies in Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, Germany finishing with a Diploma (eq. to MSc) in 1996. For his PhD work, which was funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, he joined the laboratory of Eric Verdin at The J. David Gladstone Institutes at the University of California in San Francisco, USA. There he identified a new class of histone deacetylases and worked out regulatory mechanisms of chromatin modifying complexes containing these enzymes. After graduation in 2002 he did postdoctoral work in the laboratory of C. David Allis first at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA and later at The Rockefeller University in New York, USA. Funded by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation he identified and characterized different proteins binding distinct histone lysine methylation marks. In particular, he formulated the theory of binary switches that describes how adjacent histone modifications regulate each other’s readout. In 2006 Wolfgang was appointed Independent Max Planck Group Leader at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany and established the Laboratory of Chromatin Biochemistry. In 2015 he was named Full Professor of Bioscience at KAUST.