Björn Winkler is head of the crystallography/mineralogy group at the Goethe University in Frankfurt a.M. (Germany). He has been awarded the Max-von-Laue Award of the German Crystallographic Society, the Albert-Maucher Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Victor Moritz Goldschmidt Award of the German Mineralogical Society, the European Mineralogical Union Medal for Research excellence and the MSI Academic Award. He is a fellow of the American Mineralogical Society since 1998 and was the Los Alamos National Laboratory "Wheatley Scholar" in 2010/2011. He was elected member of the AIRAPT Executive Committee in 2009.