Professor Sibylle Günter has been the Scientific Director of the German 'Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics' (IPP) since February 2011. She took her degree in physics at the University of Rostock in 1987 and three years later completed her PhD at the Department of Theoretical Physics there. Subsequently she worked at the University of Rostock, the University of Maryland and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She qualified for a lectureship at the University of Rostock in 1996 with a thesis entitled 'Optical Properties of Dense Plasmas' and she still gives lectures there. Since 2006 she has also held a part-time professorship at the Technical University Munich.