Dr. Kempf was an undergraduate at the University of Heidelberg (Germany's oldest), and he obtained his PhD from the University of Munich. He has been awarded various scholarships, including an LGFG scholarship from the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg and scholarships from the German National Merit Foundation. After his PhD, he spent five years at the University of Cambridge, at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), the last three of which as a Research Fellow of one of the Cambridge Colleges (Corpus). He then spent three years at the Institute for Fundamental Theory at University of Florida, after which he joined the Department of Applied Mathematics here at UW in 2001.