Stefan Hell, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said his Romanian roots are very important to him and that the education he received in Romania helped him start his career.

“I went to high school in Timisoara and that’s where I first started studying Physics. I won a local Physics contest and I was encouraged to pursue my studies. The education I received in Romania helped me a lot and made my life easier when I moved to Germany,” Hell said in an interview for Romanian Digi 24 news station.

Stefan W. Hell and Americans Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.

Stefan Hell was born in Arad and spent his childhood in a village called Santana. He went to Nikolaus Lenau high school in Timisoara, which he attended for one year. He moved to Germany in 1978, when he was 16.

He studied Physics at the University of Heidelberg and got a doctorate degree in Physics in 1990. Hell is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, in Göttingen, and division head at the German Cancer Research Center, in Heidelberg, Germany.

editor@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Photo by :Ansgar Pudenz)