Carsten Marr received his diploma in general physics from the TU München in 2002. He received his PhD from Technische Universität Darmstadt in June 2007 and joined Jacobs University Bremen as a postdoctoral fellow (PostDoc), focusing on gene regulatory networks.

In 2008 he joined the Helmholtz Munich as a PostDoc in the Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology working on the quantification, analysis, and modelling of stem cell data. He became deputy director and group leader at the Institute of Computational Biology in 2013.

In 2017, he received the Erwin-Schrödinger Prize and the CSB2 Prize in Systems Biology for his interdisciplinary contributions to the quantification of single blood stem cells. In 2019, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant for establishing Computational Hematopathology. Since 2021 he is the director of the Institute of AI for Health (AIH) at Helmholtz Munich.