Before moving to Berlin, he was Peter Sowerby Research Associate in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music in London. Mats completed his PhD within the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice at King’s College London, investigating embodied cross-modal mappings of sound and music. He studied psychology at the universities of Würzburg and Amsterdam, before graduating with an MSc in Music, Mind and Brain from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Küssner's work has been published in Psychology of Music, Empirical Musicology Review, Literary and Linguistic Computing, NeuroImage and PLOS ONE. Together with Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, he co-edited a special issue on Music and Shape published in Empirical Musicology Review in 2013. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of Music & Science, a new peer-reviewed open access online journal to be launched in 2017.