Achim Blumensath received his PhD in 2003 from RWTH Aachen under the supervision of Erich Grädel. After spending one year as a postdoc at Université Bordeaux 1, he got a position at TU Darmstadt, where he did his habilitation in 2008. He visited Université Paris-Diderot for one year in 2011. Recently he became an Associate Professor at Masaryk University Brno. His field of research is monadic second-order logic and its connections to automata theory and graph theory.