Klaus Blaum studied physics at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz (Germany). After receiving his PhD, he worked as PostDoc for the “GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung” (Darmstadt, Germany) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. From 2004 to 2007, he was leader of a Helmholtz Research Group in Mainz (Germany), where he habilitated in 2006. At the age of only 35 years, he was appointed Director of the department “Stored and cooled ions” at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and as Professor and faculty member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg.

For his groundbreaking research, Klaus Blaum was awarded numerous prizes, including the Mattauch-Herzog-Price 2005 of the German Society for Mass Spectrometry, the G.N. Flerov-Prize in 2013, and the Lise Meitner Prize for Nuclear Physics of the European Physical Society (EPS) in 2020. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2008 and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2019. On July 1st 2020, the Senate of the Max Planck Society elected Klaus Blaum as the new Scientific Vice-President for the Chemistry, Physics and Technology Section of the MPG.