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. 
In Dec, 2011 she became director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. 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 was the distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Magnetic Society, she received the Nakamura lecture award of the UC Santa Barbara and the SUR-grant award of IBM. In July 2014, Prof. Felser received the GRC-Alexander-M-Cruickshank-Lecturer Award at the “Gordon Research Conference” in New London, NH, USA, as well as the Tsungmin Tu research prize by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan. This is the highest academic honor granted to foreign researchers in Taiwan. She has written more than 400 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.