Professor Stefan Hell is a director at both the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen 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.