After receiving a doctorate in physics and physical metallurgy from the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 1995, he joined Northwestern University for postdoctoral studies in 1996 and was reappointed at Northwestern as research faculty in 2002. His research interests include phase transformations in solids and multi-phase nanometer-scale structures and the effects of the nanostructures on the properties of structural and functional materials. He has published more than 100 research papers in these areas. He specializes in high-resolution atomic-scale materials characterization with a focus on atom-probe tomography.