Juri Rappsilber studied Chemistry at TU Berlin and Strathclyde University, Glasgow. He started to use crosslinking in the lab of Tom Rapoport, Harvard Med School, added mass spectrometry to the approach during his PhD in the lab of Matthias Mann, EMBL and Odense, and has since been pioneering crosslinking mass spectrometry. Independent since 2003, first at IFOM, Milan, then the WCCB, Edinburgh, he became a professor at University of Edinburgh in 2010 and at TU Berlin in 2011.