At the end of 1986, he obtained his Habilitation from the Université Paris-Nord (Villetaneuse).In 1982, he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as staff scientist, working on the spectroscopy and relaxation kinetics of doped van der Waals crystals using vacuum ultraviolet radiation at the synchrotron centres LURE (Orsay) and Hasylab (Hamburg). In 1987 he moved to the Freie Universität Berlin, first as Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, then as staff scientist. During this time he developed an interest for photoinduced chemical dynamics in condensed phases (solids and liquids) using synchotron radiation and laser resonance Raman spectroscopy.In 1993, he was appointed full professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland. During this time, he implemented ultrafast laser experiments for the study of the structural dynamics of molecular systems in condensed phases. He also pioneered novel picosecond, and later, femtosecond X-ray absorption experiments at the Swiss Light Source. In 2003, he became Professor of Physics and Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he pursues a variety of ultrafast UV and X-ray spectroscopic studies on chemical and biological systems.Majed Chergui has received a number of Awards such as the Medal of the CNRS, the Rammal Medal of the Euroscience Foundation (2007), the Humboldt Research Award (2009), the Kuwait Prize for Physics (2010), The Plyler Prize of the American Physical Society (2015) and the Edward Stern Award of the International X-ray Absorption Society (2015), in addition to giving several distinguished lectures, such as the Francis Perrin Lecture (French Physical Society, 2014) and the Morino Lecture (Japan, 2015). He has been or is member of several swiss national and international committees. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal “Structural Dynamics” published by the American Institute of Physics.