Stefan Walter Hell - Biography#

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

Hell 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, including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2022 Hell was admitted to the “Order Pour le Mérite". In 2023 he received the honorary medal "In Publica Commoda" of the University of Göttingen and was awarded the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring.

Stefan Hell received his doctorate (1990) 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. Hell holds honorary professorships in physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen.