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Stefan W. Hell (born 23 December 1962 in Arad, Romania) is a physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.

Life

In 1981 Hell began his studies at the University Heidelberg (Germany), where, in 1990, he received his doctorate in physics. His thesis advisor was the solid-state physicist Siegfried Hunklinger. From 1991 to 1993 Hell worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and from 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at the University of Turku (Finland) in the department for Medical Physics, where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletion STED microscopy. From 1993 to 1994 Hell was 6 months a visiting scientist at the University of Oxford (England). He received his habilitation in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1996, and the following year became a group leader of his current research group dedicated to sub-diffraction-resolution microscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

With the invention and subsequent development of Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy and related microscopy methods, he was able to show that one can substantially improve the resolving power of the fluorescence microscope, previously limited to half the wavelength of the employed light (> 200 nanometers). A microscope's resolution specifies its ability to separate closely spaced, identical objects, and is its most important property. Hell was the first to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, how one can decouple the resolution of the fluorescence microscope from diffraction and increase it to a fraction of the wavelength of light (to the nanometer scale). Ever since the work of Ernst Karl Abbe in 1873, this feat was not thought possible. For this achievement and its significance for other fields of science, such as the life-sciences and medical research, he received the 10th German Innovation Award (Deutscher Zukunftspreis) on the 23rd of November, 2006.

On October 15, 2002 Hell became a director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and he established the department of Nanobiophotonics.

Since 2003 Hell has also been the leader of the department "High Resolution Optical Microscopy division" at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Hell is married and has two sons and one daughter.

Awards

• Prize of the International Commission in Optics]], 2000
• Helmholtz-Award for metrology, Co-Rezipient, 2001
• Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis, 2002
• Carl-Zeiss Research Award, 2002
• Karl-Heinz-Beckurts-award, 2002
• C. Benz u. G. Daimler-Award of Berlin-Brandenburgisch academy, 2004
• Robert B. Woodward Scholar, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006
• 10. "Innovation Award of the German Federal President", 2006
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, 2008
• Otto-Hahn-Preis, 2009

Citations

1. ^ NanoBiophotonics - Stefan W. Hell's Personal Profile
2. ^ Deutscher Zukunftspreis
3. MPI für biophysikalische Chemie: Hell für Deutschen Zukunftspreis 2006 nominiert
4. Max film

External links

• curriculum vitae on the Website of Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
• Innovation Award of the German Federal President

Template:Persondata

• Leibniz Prize winners
• German physicists
• University of Heidelberg alumni
• Harvard University people
• Living people
• 1962 births