Born into a
Roman CatholicBanat Swabian family in
Arad,
Romania, which was part of the
Kingdom of Hungary until 1920 and where Swabians (Catholic Germans in Hungary) still constituted the third largest ethnicity, ca 7 % of the population in 1910. He is the second fully Swabian Nobel prize winner with Herta Müller. He grew up at his parents' home in nearby
Sântana.[4][5] Hell attended primary school there between 1969 and 1977.[6] Subsequently, he attended one year of secondary education at the
Nikolaus Lenau High School in
Timișoara before leaving with his parents to
West Germany in 1978.[7] His father was an engineer and his mother a teacher; the family settled in
Ludwigshafen after emigrating.[6]
Hell began his studies at the
Heidelberg University in 1981, where he received his
doctorate 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 in
confocal microscopy, which became later known as the
4Pi 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 the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory in
Heidelberg,[9] where he succeeded in demonstrating the principles of 4-Pi microscopy. From 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at the
University of Turku (Finland) in the department for
Medical Physics,[10] where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletion
STED microscopy.[11] From 1993 to 1994 Hell was also for six months a visiting scientist at the
University of Oxford (England).[10]
He received his
habilitation 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 the
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and "non-budgeted professor" (apl. Prof.) in the
Heidelberg University Faculty of Physics and Astronomy.[13] Since 2004 he has been an honorary professor for experimental physics at the faculty of physics of the
University of Göttingen.[14]
With the invention and subsequent development of
Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy and
related 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's
resolution 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 of
Ernst 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]