Michael Zürch finished his diploma thesis in 2010 on optical induced damage in nanostructures at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena earning him the best diploma thesis award of the faculty. During his doctorate he contributed to eight peer-reviewed journal articles, first-authoring five of them. Furthermore, he contributed to two patents and more than a dozen conference presentations, winning an award at the SPIE Medical Imaging 2014 conference for his cancer cell classification research. He finished his PhD thesis in 2014 at the Institute of Optics and Quantum Electronics at FSU Jena on the generation of coherent laser-like extreme ultraviolet light and its application to high-resolution imaging.