Martin Dienwiebel studied Physics at the University Dortmund and the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms University Bonn. He conducted his diploma research at the Forschungszentrum Jülich using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy. He performed his doctoral research with Joost Frenken at the Institute for Atomic and molecular Physics in Amsterdam, the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory in Leiden and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Martin Dienwiebel obtained his PhD 2003 at Leiden University on the topic "Superlubricity of Graphite". 

Afterwards he worked in the Tribology department of IAVF Antriebstechnik AG. 2008 he received an Emmy-Noether grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and set up a junior research group at the Karlsruhe Institute for  Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM. 2011 obtained his habilitation from KIT and 2016 he took a Heisenberg-Professur for Applied Nanotribology.

Since 2017 Martin Dienwiebel is a visiting professor at Kumamoto University in Japan und there, a member of the Advanced Structural Materials Group of IROAST.