Samuel Wagner studied Human Biology at the Philipps-University Marburg and Biomedicine at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, where he obtained his Master in Medical Sciences in 2003. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry for his work on the biogenesis and overexpression of membrane proteins in Escherichia coli with Jan-Willem de Gier at the Center of Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University in 2008. As a spin-off of his graduate work, he co-founded the biotech start-up Xbrane Biosciences, now Xbrane Biopharma. He was awarded the Innovation Stipend of the City of Stockholm for his development of the Lemo System, a tunable expression system for difficult target proteins. Samuel Wagner started to work on the export machinery of bacterial type III secretion systems as an EMBO and HFSP postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Jorge Galán at Yale University. He joined the Faculty of Medicine at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen as an Assistant Professor of Infection Biology in early 2012 and was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Sofja Kovalevskaja Award in the same year. In 2014, Samuel Wagner was listed by the magazine Capital as one of the most influential junior scientists in Germany in the selection 4 x 40 under 40. Samuel Wagner became head of the Section of Cellular and Molecular Microbiology in 2015 and tenured professor in 2018. He is Director of Graduate Studies of the Interfaculty Graduate School of Microbiology and Infection Biology (IGIM), chair of the IMIT and vice dean of the faculty of medicine of the University of Tübingen.