Woerner is a department head at the Max-Born-Institute, Berlin, Germany, and holds a lecturer qualification (Habilitation) in physics at Humboldt University, Berlin. He received a Dr. rer. nat. degree from the Technical University of Munich in 1991 and worked there as a postdoc until 1993. He then joined the Max-Born-Institute in 1993 and spent a postdoc period at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies), Holmdel, in 1997.
