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, Bio-ethics, and Epistemology.

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 micro-scopes became nano-scopes. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Kavli Prize for Nano-Science and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014.