Matthias Kling studied physics at the University of Göttingen, where he graduated in 1998. He went on to work on his dissertation in femtosecond spectroscopy and received his doctoral degree in 2002. In 2003, as a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he used infrared spectroscopy to analyze ultrafast charge-transfer processes in organometallic complexes. At the end of 2004, having received a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union, he joined professor Marc Vrakking’s group at the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam applying ultrashort laser pulses and attosecond spectroscopy in research on atoms and molecules. From 2007 until 2012, he led an Emmy Noether and Heisenberg research group, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. During this period, he laid much of the foundation for subsequent developments in the application of attosecond spectroscopy to nanostructures. Following a short period as assistant professor at Kansas State University in the United States, he was appointed in 2013 to his present position as professor in Ultrafast Imaging and Nanophotonics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.