After internships in agricultural companies in Germany and Canada Jung studied at the
University of Göttingen with Hans Günter Schlegel, and in 1981 obtained a diploma on the basis of the "Detection of nitrogen fixation in two strains of the hydrogen bacterium
Alcaligenes latus". He studied at the Institute for Plant Production and Plant Breeding of the same university, where he received his doctorate in 1984 with a thesis on the "Intrinsic performance and interactions of rye and wheat genomes in triticale" supervised by Gerhard Röbbelen. Later Jung had positions at the
Leibniz University Hannover and
LMU Munich before becoming Professor and Director at the Plant Breeding Institute of Kiel University. ==Research==