Christian Riess received his diploma in computer science in June 2007, and his doctoral degree in January 2013 at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. During his undergraduate studies, he worked on combinatorial optimization. During his graduate studies, he examined reflectance analysis for computer vision applications. His research interests include image forensics, illuminant color estimation, optical inspection and material analysis. Among other activities, Riess served in the Senate and the curriculum committee of the Friedrich-Alexander-University. He has been member of the organizing committee of the local branch of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) and the chair's liaison member of the RoboCup robot soccer team. Riess is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Radiological Sciences Lab at Stanford University, working on X-ray phase-contrast imaging for medical applications.

For more detail, see his complete curriculum vitae.