Wolfgang Knoll was Managing Director of the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna from 2008 to 2023 and is Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University Singapore since 2009.

He graduated from the University of Konstanz in 1976 with a PhD degree in Biophysics after having completed an education in Physics at the Karlsruhe University of Technology. From 1980-1981, he was a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California and the Institute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, from 1981-1986 an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and in 1986 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, as a group leader.

From 1991-1999, Wolfgang Knoll was the Director of the Laboratory for Exotic Nanomaterials, hosted by the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Wako/Japan and from 1992 to 2010, he was a Consulting Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.

From 1993 to 2008, Wolfgang Knoll was the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. In 1998, he became a Professor of Chemistry (by courtesy) at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and in 1999, he was appointed Adjunct Professor by Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea.