Klaus Kern is Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany, and Professor Emeritus at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He is an honorary professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He studied physics and chemistry at the University of Bonn and obtained his doctorate in physical chemistry in 1986. After completing his doctoral thesis, he was a research assistant at the Jülich Research Centre and a visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, USA, before being appointed to the EPFL in 1991 and the Max Planck Society in 1998.