Maarten De Mol is a strain engineering specialist for multiple conventional microorganisms like S. cerevisiae and E. coli as well as for several less-conventional microorganisms. He monitors the lack of production robustness in heterologous hosts as well as develops novel strain engineering techniques to transform these microorganisms into cell factories applicable in a biobased economy. Maarten heads the GlycoActives research group and coordinates the FWO-SBO project ‘Iminogene’ which not only focuses on metabolic engineering but also on genome mining for the biosynthesis of specialty carbohydrates.