Thomas Pfeifer, born 1977 in Miltenberg, studied physics at the University of Würzburg, Germany and the University of Texas at Austin, USA, finished his PhD in 2004 again in Würzburg, before he accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of California at Berkeley. From 2009 to 2014, he has been head of the independent Max Planck Research Group “Interatto” at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. Since 2009 he is a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. In 2013 he was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis and in 2014 he won a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council with his project “X-MUSIC”. Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (since 2014).