Since 2013, Jens Kirstein has worked as a scientific assistant at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a PhD student at the International Max Planck Research School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles, in cooperation with the Graduate Academy (fellowship) at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he worked on the timing of long-term carbonate mobilization in a limestone aquifer. He attained an MSc in geological sciences with the thesis “Incipient inversion of the middle Archean Moodies Basin, Barberton Supergroup, Barberton Greenstone Belt, South Africa.”