Simone Wiegand studied physics at the University of Bielefeld where she received her diploma in 1988 working on diode pumped solid state laser at the Laser Center in Hannover. She received her PhD from the University of Bremen in 1993, studying phase transitions in binary mixtures close the critical point using light scattering methods. In 1994 she received a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Humboldt foundation and worked at NIST in Gaithersburg (USA) on spinodal decomposition, viscosity and light scattering on ionic binary mixtures close to the critical point. Back in Germany in 1996, she initialized a project to study transport phenomena in complex fluids as salt mixtures, polymer solutions and gels in Bremen. In 1998 she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research where she continued her research on the dynamic of complex fluids developing scattering techniques and headed the service group for polymer analysis. In 2003 she received her habilitation from the University Bremen and joined the group of Jan Dhont at the Forschungszentrum in Jülich.