Juergen Plitzko studied mineralogy and physics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and conducted his PhD research from 1994 to 1998 at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart, Germany. His first postdoctoral position was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he moved from materials to life sciences. He joined Wolfgang Baumeisters' Department of Molecular Structural Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, first as a postdoc and later as head of the EM group. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and consulting group leader at CEITEC, Central European Institute of Technology, at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic. Since 2016, Jürgen Plitzko has been a permanent research group leader for cryo-EM technology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.

Research in JP's group focuses on developing and applying tools and technologies in and for cryo-EM. He is particularly interested in improving cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and, most importantly, making all steps from sample preparation to imaging and final data processing more practical. A major goal is to bridge the gap between molecular and cellular structural biology and to apply cryo-ET to larger samples such as small organisms and tissues.