He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellow of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Fellow of the German Scholarship Foundation. He received his PhD from the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. His research deals with plant secondary metabolism, plant and forest genomics, and plant defense. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed publications and holds several patents. His research is funded by NSERC and other sources. He has been project leader of five large-scale Genome Canada projects. He has received numerous awards and distinctions for his research and leadership.