After a Master's degree at the Technical University of Munich and placements at Munich's Helmholtz Centre (Germany), Dr Nefzger undertook doctoral studies at the Monash Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences in Australia. Following postdoctoral work in Prof. Jose Polo's laboratory at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (late 2011 onwards), he was appointed Group Leader of the Reprogramming and Ageing Laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at UQ in late 2018. He is an expert in reprogramming, epigenetics, and cellular ageing with >4000 citations and publications in renowned journals of Cell, Nature and Science families. A recent study from his laboratory (Patrick et al., Cell Metabolism 2024) decoded the process of how genes change activity from birth to adulthood and into old age across >45 mouse and human cell types, including for hepatocytes. AP-1 was identified as a key regulator involved in driving organismal maturation processes across cell types. AP-1 linked chromatin opening was functionally linked to the decommissioning of "early-life" gene regulatory elements to reprogram cell transcriptome and function during development. Ongoing AP-1 linked chromatin opening in aging hijacks this process, which may drive many of aging's predictable phenotypes. Current work entails understanding how this manifests at the organ level via spatial transcriptomics using the liver as a model system.