Ralf is a senior scientist at GSI in Darmstadt, where he works on the ALICE experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He studied physics at the universities of Münster and Gießen. He received his Ph.D. with the TAPS experiment studying carbon-ion collisions at intermediate energies. He joined the State University of New York in Stony Brook, first as a Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Humboldt Foundation and then as a faculty member. Ralf worked there for almost a decade on particle and high-energy heavy-ion physics with the PHENIX experiment at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider before returning to Germany in 2008. His main field of research is related to the measurement of hadrons carrying charm or beauty quarks and their use as probes for the quark-gluon plasma that is produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Ralf has always been interested in outreach activities such as laboratory open days, visits at the experiment, presentations for the general public, exhibitions, and, in particular, activities with teachers and students at schools. He is active in the German "Netzwerk Teilchenwelt" and in the organization of masterclasses in and around Darmstadt. Ralf enjoys visiting local schools to show the students that physics is fun.