Markus Aspelmeyer is an Austrian quantum physicist. Aspelmeyer was born 1974 in the Bavarian town Schongau. He also attended the local school, where he received his abitur in 1993. He studied physics and philosophy at the University of Munich, receiving his BS in philosophy and his Ph.D in physics in 2002. He joined the group of Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna in 2002 with a Feodor Lynen PostDoctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He became Universitätsassistent at the University and then, Junior, later Senior Researcher, at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences where he is leading a research team working on quantum effects in micro- and nanomechanical systems. His research interests are quantu