Dear Graduate Students,
we warmly invite you to this year’s upcoming annual Graduate Students’ Day on November 13, 2019. It is a great pleasure to host Nobel Laureate Professor Dr. Stefan Hell as our keynote speaker. We would hereby like to provide you with a detailed agenda and additional information about our special guest Prof. Hell.
Prof. Stefan W. Hell (born in 1962) studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and received his doctoral degree in 1990. Following a research stay at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, he worked as a senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland. It wasn’t until 1993, that his ideas about revolutionizing the resolving power of light microscopes took shape. Prof. Hell’s ideas opposed a seemingly irrefutable dogma, which was established more than 120 years ago by physicist Ernst Abbe and showed that an optical microscope cannot resolve two points that are closer than 200 nm. However, with endurance and persistence, Prof. Hell succeeded in undermining this resolution border and revolutionized the field of optical microscopy with his invention of the STED (Stimulated Emission Depletion)-microscope. In 1997, he moved to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where he set up a Junior Research Group and was promoted to Director at the Institute only five years later. His pioneering work allowed groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of biological and medical research and he was honored with the nobel prize in Chemistry in 2014. Prof. Hell currently heads the Department of NanoBiophotonics at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. At the same time, he is the Director of the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg.
We are delighted to have Prof. Hell at the Center and are looking forward to his keynote speech. A moderated questions and answers session will follow his lecture. We highly encourage you to ask your questions during this session, please don’t be shy but take advantage of this great opportunity to approach Prof. Hell!
We are hoping to see you all at the Graduate Students’ Day, November 13, 2019!
Your HELENA Team
There is no need to register for the Graduate Students’ Day in advance; please register at the registration desk in the morning. All graduate students are welcome to join!