Rolf Müller studied pharmacy at Bonn University and obtained his PhD at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biology. In 1996, he went to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA . This was when he began to investigate the production of antibiotics in bacteria. Two years later he returned to Germany as a junior group leader at the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF, now the HZI) in Braunschweig. In 2000, he completed his habilitation thesis at the Technische Universität Braunschweig on the biosynthesis of antibiotics in actinomycetes and myxobacteria.
Since October 2003, Rolf Müller has held a chair as professor of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University. In 2009 Rolf Müller became the managing director of the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), heads the Department of “Microbial Natural Products” (MINS) and co-founded the PharmBioTec GmbH in Saarbrücken. Within the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) Rolf Müller coordinates the thematic unit “Novel Antibiotics.”
His research has already earned the Phoenix-Pharmacy Research Award three times (2001,2007,2016) the DECHEMA Award for the Natural Products Research (2002), the BioFuture Award of the GermanFederal Ministry for Education and Research (2003), and the DECHEMA Award of the Max-Buchner Research Foundation (2010). In 2018, Rolf Müller received the Inhoffen Medal awarded by the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and Technical University Braunschweig
Since 2012 he has been a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering. In 2016 he also become elected member of National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina)