Prof. Dr. Sven Apel holds the Chair of Software Engineering at Saarland University & Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany. Prof. Apel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of Magdeburg. His research interests include software product lines, software analysis, optimization, and evolution, as well as empirical methods and the human factor in software engineering. He is the author or co-author of over one two hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. He serves regularly in program committees of top-ranked international conferences, and he is a member of the editorial boards of Empirical Software Engineering and IEEE Software. He was PC co-chair of the 31st International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) and the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), and he served in the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2017-2021). His work has been funded by the esteemed Emmy-Noether Program and the Heisenberg Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2018, the Association for Computing Machinery appointed him as ACM Distinguished Member for “Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing”. His work has received one Most Influential Paper Award (SPLC’18), two Best Paper Awards (SPLC’11, Modularity’15), two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards (ICSE’15, ICSE’21), as well as awards by the Ernst-Denert Foundation, the Karin-Witte Foundation, and the State of Saxony-Anhalt.