Peter Gumbsch received his degree in physics (1988) and his doctoral degree (1991) from the University of Stuttgart. After extended visits at the Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, postdoctoral work at the Imperial College, London and the University of Oxford, he returned to the Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart as a group leader and established the group “Modeling and Simulation of Thin Film Phenomena”. In 2001 he took the chair for Mechanics of Materials at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT and the position as head of Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg.