Microscopy pioneer Stefan Hell visits West Campus
John MacMicking and Joerg Nikolaus flank Stefan Hell on a recent visit to Yale’s West Campus
Director Joerg Nikolaus showcases Imaging Core technology to Stefan Hell
Yale’s West Campus recently had the honor of hosting Nobel laureate and microscopy pioneer Stefan Hell for a tour of its Imaging Core. Accompanied by Director Joerg Nikolaus and Professor John MacMicking, Hell explored the facility’s state-of-the-art technology and innovations.
Hell is credited with overcoming the diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing fluorescence microscope. He received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this accomplishment. Throughout the 20th century, it was widely accepted that a light microscope relying on propagating light waves and conventional optical lenses could not discern details that were much finer than about half the wavelength of light, or 200-400 nanometers, due to diffraction.
The MacMicking Lab brought the MINFLUX to West Campus in 2024
Hell’s team shattered the limit of microscopic resolution when they developed Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy, or STED, the first light-focusing microscope with a resolution at the nanoscale. A 2D STED microscope, the Abberior STEDYCON, is available to scientists in the Imaging Core.
More recently, the Hell Lab revisited the basic physical principles underlying nanoscopy to pioneer MINFLUX imaging (nanoscopy with MINimal photon FLUXes), obtaining the ultimate super resolution: the size of a molecule (~1 nm).
Hell, MacMicking and Nikolaus talk science against the artistic backdrop of the West Campus Image Core
This technology was brought to the West Campus last year by John MacMicking, a professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and of Immunobiology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
MINFLUX, the world’s most powerful 3D super-resolution fluorescence microscope, is providing MacMicking’s lab at the Yale Systems Biology Institute with unprecedented measurement capabilities to study how cells defend against infection. The objects being studied – viruses and bacteria, for example – are minuscule in size, so the MINFLUX is the ideal tool to investigate cellular events critical for controlling human pathogens.
“He never stops in his research, looking to the next challenge to drive science discovery even further”
Joerg Nikolaus
Stefan Hell tours the microscopy resources at Yale’s West Campus
“It was fascinating to meet the inventor of the STED microscope, but what inspired me was Stefan’s hunger for new discoveries,” said Nikolaus during the tour of the Imaging Core’s broad collection of shared instruments.
Hell is a director at both the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. The Romanian-German physicist holds honorary professorships in physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen.
Find out more about the West Campus Imaging Core at research.yale.edu/cores/wcic