Wendelin Werner received his Ph.D. in 1993 under Jean-Francois Le Gall at Universite Paris VI and his early research included hard results on self-repelling motion and on the ``hot spots" conjecture for planar diffusions. Since around 2000 he has been a central figure, along with co-authors Greg Lawler and Oded Schramm, in the study of two-dimensional random systems exhibiting conformal invariance. This exciting body of work links the stochastic Loewner equation with intersection exponents for Brownian motion, variants of self-avoiding random walks, uniform spanning trees in the lattice, and with critical percolation. It also develops new continuous processes such as Brownian loop soup.