Brief biography of professor Richard Zare Born on 19 November, 1939 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Dr. Richard Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science, Department of Chemistry, Stanford University. His research covers many different areas but is quite noted for advances in laser chemistry, resulting in a greater understanding of chemical reactions at the molecular level and contributing very significantly to solving a variety of problems in chemical analysis. His development of laser induced fluorescence as a method for studying reaction dynamics has been widely adopted in other laboratories.

Awards include the U.S. National Medal of Science (1983), the Welch Award in Chemistry (1999), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2005), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences (2010), and the King Faisal International Prize in Science (2011). He has also received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University and Chalmers Institute of Technology among other institutions. His memberships include the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Indian Academy of Sciences, and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for developing countries.

From 1992 to 1998, he served on the National Science Board, the policy making board of the United States National Science Foundation, the last two years as its Chair. He presently chairs COSEPUP, the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

Brief biography of professor Stefan W. Hell Stefan W. Hell is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, where he leads the Department of NanoBiophotonics. He is an honorary professor of experimental physics at the University of Göttingen and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg. Since 2003 he also led the Optical Nanoscopy division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Stefan W. Hell received his diploma (1987) and doctorate (1990) in physics from the University of Heidelberg. From 1991 to 1993 he worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, also in Heidelberg, and followed with stays as a senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, between 1993 and 1996, and as a visiting scientist at the University of Oxford, England, in 1994. In 1997 he was appointed to the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a group leader and was promoted in 2002 to director.

Stefan W. Hell is credited with having conceived, validated and applied the first viable concept for overcoming Abbe’s diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing fluorescence microscope. For this accomplishment he has received several awards: most recently he shared the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry