Kern received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2008.
Since 1998, he is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
[2] Through his research and publications, Kern has pioneered the bottom-up fabrication and characterization of nanostructures all the way down to molecular and atomic length scales.
He and his group have developed novel methods to control atomic and molecular interactions at surfaces which have provided the unique ability to engineer atomic and molecular architectures of well-defined size, shape, composition and functionality.
[4] In 2008, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.