Prof. Dr. Michael Waltisberg was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1971. After graduating from high school, he studied Islamic Studies in Basel from 1993 to 2000, and then Semitic Studies in Munich, where he also earned a Magister Artium. For his doctoral project, he moved to the University of Marburg, where he was a research assistant in the Department of Semitic Studies until 2014. Here he completed his doctorate in 2008 with a thesis on the syntax of Classical Arabic. The sentence structures of the Neo-Aramaic Ṭuroyo (Surayt) formed the subject of his habilitation project, which he completed in 2014 with the venia legendi for Semitic Studies. Following a project on Syriac (Middle Aramaic) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and professorships in Erlangen and Heidelberg, he was appointed Professor of Semitic Studies at the University of Heidelberg at the beginning of 2021. The Research Centre for Aramaic Studies, which is supported by the NISIBIN Foundation, is also associated with the chair. Since February 2023, Michael Waltisberg has held the position of Faculty Coordinator for the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences at TDU. He is in a relationship and has a daughter.