Pope Francis appointed Professor Stefan Walter Hell, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, and of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is of international scope, multi-racial in its composition and non-sectarian in the election of its Members. The Academy’s work includes six areas: Basic Sciences, Sciences, and Technology of Global Problems, Science of the Problems of the Developing World, Scientific Policy, Bioethics, and Epistemology.
Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry
Professor Hell has worked on the error of fluorescence of super-resolution, which made it possible to visualize details with a ten times greater superior precision, attaining the resolution of a few nano-meters; thus the microscopes became nano-scopes. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Kavli Prize for Nano-Science and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014. He is married and has four children.
Director of the Mac Planck Institute
The Academy’s new Member was born in Arad, Romania in 1962. He received his Doctorate in Physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1990. He then worked in the European Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 1991 to 1993, as Senior Researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, between 1993 and 1996, and as Guest Researcher at Oxford University in 1994.
Since 2002, he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen and, since 2017, also of the Max Planck Institute of Medical Research in Heidelberg.
