Hell began his studies at theHeidelberg University in 1981, where he received hisdoctorate in physics in 1990. His thesis advisor was the solid-state physicist Siegfried Hunklinger. The title of the thesis was "Imaging of transparent microstructures in a confocal microscope".[8] He was an independent inventor for a short period thereafter working on improving depth (axial)resolution inconfocal microscopy, which became later known as the4Pi microscope. Resolution is the possibility to separate two similar objects in close proximity and is therefore the most important property of a microscope.
From 1991 to 1993, Hell worked at theEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory inHeidelberg,[9] where he succeeded in demonstrating the principles of 4-Pi microscopy. From 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at theUniversity of Turku (Finland) in the department forMedical Physics,[10] where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletionSTED microscopy.[11] From 1993 to 1994 Hell was also for six months a visiting scientist at theUniversity of Oxford (England).[10]He received hishabilitation in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1996. On 15 October 2002, Hell became a director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen[12] and he established the department of Nanobiophotonics. Since 2003 Hell has also been the leader of the department "Optical Nanoscopy division" at theGerman Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and "non-budgeted professor" (apl. Prof.) in theHeidelberg University Faculty of Physics and Astronomy.[13] Since 2004 he has been an honorary professor for experimental physics at the faculty of physics of theUniversity of Göttingen.[14]
With the invention and subsequent development ofStimulated Emission Depletion microscopy andrelated 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'sresolution 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 ofErnst 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 23 November 2006. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014, becoming the second Nobelist born in the Banat Swabian community (after Herta Müller, the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature).[3]
Hell serves on the Executive Advisory Board of theWorld.Minds Foundation, where he contributes to global dialogue on science, technology, and innovation.[16]
^"Preis der Akademie".gestiftet von der Gottlieb Daimler- und Karl Benz-Stiftung – Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (in German). Retrieved28 December 2024.
