Riga Tawo is Director of the Diabetes Research group at CBmed in Graz. He is a developmental biologist who earned his PhD at the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn, Germany. Driven by a fascination with how multicellular life emerges, he has worked throughout his career to develop and apply in vitro and in vivo models that recapitulate development from single cells to complex tissues, enabling state-of-the-art disease models and cell therapy approaches. He strengthened his expertise in stem cell technologies and tissue engineering across multiple disease areas through positions at A*STAR in Singapore and later at Evotec International in Germany. Beyond diabetes, his research interests include protein degradation and proteostasis in the context of aging and age-associated diseases, as well as immuno-oncology.