Dieter Lüst was born in Chicago, USA, on 21 September  1956; he graduated from the Ludwig-Maxilians-Universität of Munich in 1985. Then from 1985 - 1990 he worked as a postdoc at Caltech, Pasadena, at the Max-Planck-Institut for Physics in Munich and as a fellow at CERN. In 1990 he was awarded a Heisenberg fellowship for a research stay at CERN. In 1993 he became full professor for physics (Chair Quantum Field Theory) at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. In 1998 he was offered a Full-professorship for Theoretical Physics at the ETH in Zürich. In 1998 he was appointed as External Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Intitut for Gravitational Physics in Golm (Albert-Einstein-Institut) and in 2003 he was appointed as Director and Scientific Member of the Max-Planck-Institut for Physics (Werner-Heisenberg-Institut) in Munich.  Since July 2018 he is the managing director of this institute. Since 2004 he is holding the Chair for Mathematical Physics at the Ludwig Maxilians-Universität (LMU) in München. At the moment he is the spokesman of the Arnold-Sommerfeld-Center for Theoretical Physics at the LMU and the spokesman of the Elite Master Study Program in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at LMU. He is member of the board of the Center  for Advanced Studies (CAS) at LMU and member of the board of the Excellence Cluster "Origin and Structure of the Universe" in Munich. Between 2004 - 2008 he was the coordinator of an European RTN-network "Basic Constituents, Fundamental Forces and Symmetries of the Universe".
He has written about 200 articles in peer-revied journals and he has co-authored two text books on string theory  and many conference proceedings. He has written one popular book "Quantenfische - Die Stringtheorie und die Suche nach der Weltformel" (CH-Beck Verlag). He is editor in chief of the International Journal "Progress of Physics" ("Fortschritte der Physics - Wiley VCH) and is member of the editorial board of the "Journal for High Energy Physics (JHEP, Springer).

Dieter Lüst received the "Leibniz-Preis" of the German-Research-Foundation (DFG) in the year 2000 and he has received the "Humboldt-Gay-Lussac Prize" of the French Minister of Science in the year 2006. Since 1999 he is Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science. In 2012 he received an ERC-Advanced-Grant.