Born in California, Guinevere Kauffmann spent her high school and undergraduate years in South Africa before moving to England. M.Sc. in Astronomy, University Cape Town (1990), PhD in Astronomy, University of Cambridge (1993). Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (1993-1994), postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. From 2003, group leader and from 2013 Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.