Stefan Hell is a director at both the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research Heidelberg, Germany.

He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Heidelberg. From 1991 to 1993 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, followed by stays as a senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, between 1993 and 1996, and as a visiting scientist at the University of Oxford, England, in 1994. In 1997 he was appointed to the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a group leader and was promoted to director in 2002. From 2003 to 2017 he also led a research group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ).

Hell holds honorary professorships in physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen. He is credited with having conceived, validated and applied the first viable concept for overcoming Abbe’s diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing fluorescence microscope. For this accomplishment he has received numerous awards, in 2014 he shared the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

More about Stefan Hell and the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.