Professor Volmer is Full Professor and Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 

He graduated with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Hannover in 1994, under the supervision of Karsten Levsen. After postdoctoral research as ORISE Fellow at the National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson, AR/USA, he joined the National Research Council's Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada in 1996 as a research associate. He then spent a few years as Head of the Analytical Research Facility at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, and subsequently returned to Canada in 2001, as Senior Research Officer and Group Leader Biological Mass Spectrometry at the Institute for Marine Biosciences in Halifax. In 2007, Dietrich Volmer accepted a position as Head of the Department Bioanalytical Sciences of the Medical Research Council's Human Nutrition Research Institute in Cambridge, UK. He became Krupp Professor and Chair in Analytical Chemistry, and Director of the Institute of Bioanalytical Chemistry, at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany in 2010, until he moved to his current position in Berlin in 2018.

Dietrich Volmer has been Editor of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry since 2004 and has recently been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analytical Science Advances. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and currently serves as Vice President of the German Society for Mass Spectrometry.