Giessibl studied physics from 1982 to 1987 at the Technical University of Munich and at Eidgenössische Technischen Hochschule Zürich.

After submitting his PhD thesis in the end of 1991, he continued for 6 months as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Physics Group Munich and moved to Silicon Valley to join Park Scientific Instruments, Inc as a senior scientist and later director of vacuum products from mid 1992 until the end of 1994.

He joined the Munich office of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company from 1995 to 1996 as a senior associate.

Some of Giessibl's experimental and simulated images inspired the offset print editions Erster Blick (2000) [4] and Graphit (2004) by visual artist Gerhard Richter.

Together with his team, he even obtained subatomic spatial resolution (F.J. Giessibl, S. Hembacher, H. Bielefeldt, J. Mannhart, Science 2000),[7][8][9][10][11] and published papers on ground breaking experiments,[12][13] instrumentation[14] and theoretical foundations[15][16] of atomic force microscopy.