For over 10 years, Marten Winter has been head of sDiv, the synthesis center of iDiv, the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Leipzig. From 1998 to 2005, he studied biology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. During his studies, he completed research stays of several months in South Africa and Mongolia. From 2005 to 2008, Marten Winter wrote his PhD thesis on "Aspects of biotic homogenization - from regional to global scales" with Prof. Ingolf Kühn (UFZ/MLU) and Prof. Wolfgang Nentwig (University of Bern). In 2009 he was a PostDoc for the German Federal Agency for Nature Protection in the project "Effects of Climate Change on German Fauna" and in the working group of Sven Bacher (University of Fribourg; CH) in the project Pratique "Enhancements of Pest Risk Analysis Techniques ". From 2010 to 2013 he worked as a PostDoc at the Department of Biocenosis Research (UFZ) on a wide variety of projects - including monitoring of climate change effects on biodiversity in the German state of Saxony, the effects of habitat fragmentation on wild cats, and he also worked as a researcher and author for the 5th IPCC report.
His research focus is on biodiversity and invasive species. He has been one of the most cited ecologists in the world for several years.