Prof. Thomas Illig is heading the central biobank of Hannover Medical School (MHH) called "Hannover Unified Biobank (HUB)". MHH is one of the largest medical faculties in Germany including more than 60 institutes with more than 9 000 employees. Prof. Illig and his team have established a modern high-throughput biobank at MHH. He has a longstanding experience in biobanking as well as in environmental, molecular and genetic epidemiology. The main focus of his work is biobanking qualty research as well as the molecular characterization of complex and rare diseases. Prof. Illig is author of more than 700 peer-reviewed publications also in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, Plos Genetics, Lancet and the American Journal of Human Genetics.