Claudia Felser studied chemistry and physics at the University of Cologne and completed her doctorate in physical chemistry there in 1994.
After postdoctoral fellowships at the MPI in Stuttgart and the CNRS in Nantes (France), she joined the University of Mainz. She was a visiting scientist at Princeton University (USA) in 1999 and at Stanford University in 2009/2010 and a visiting professor at the University of Caen (France).
She became a full professor at the University of Mainz in 2003.
Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids since December 2011.

She is the chair of the DFG research group "New Materials with High Spin Polarization" and is the director of the Graduate School of Excellence "Materials Science in Mainz" of the German Science Foundation (DFG).

She was honored with the order of merit "Landesverdienstorden" of the state Rhineland-Palatinate for the foundation of a lab for school students at the University of Mainz. The materials under investigation are Heusler compounds and compounds with related structure types. In 2010, she is the distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Magnetic Society, the Nakamura lecture award of the UC Santa Barbara and she received the SUR-grant award of IBM.

Prof. Felser has written more than 200 articles and been granted several patents. Her recent research focuses on the rational design of new materials for spintronics and energy technologies such as solar cells, thermoelectric materials, topological insulators and superconductors.