Volkhard Helms studied physics in Freiburg and Munich and obtained a PhD in physics in 1996 from LMU Munich for predoctoral work conducted at EMBL Heidelberg. From 1996–1998, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego. Subsequently, he headed an independent junior research group at the MPI of biophysics in Frankfurt from 1998–2003. Since 2003, he has been a full professor of bioinformatics at Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany. In 2001, he obtained an EMBO Young Investigator award.