Virtual International Microscopy Lecture Series - Dr Harald Hess

Dr Harald Hess

Harald Hess is currently a Senior Group Leader at the Janelia Campus of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. With a long-term passion for seeing new phenomenon grounded on experimental physics, he participated in a 1 MEV electron microscope construction for revealing new biology with Prof. Elmar Zeitler as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. After a PhD in low temperature experimental physics at Princeton in 1982, Harald Hess pursued cryogenic hydrogen atom trapping, cooling, and its Bose-Einstein condensation at MIT as a postdoc. Next at Bell Labs he developed various low temperature scanning probe microscopes to visualize diverse physics at the quantum level from superconducting vortices, single electrons to individual luminescent centers. He left Bell in 1997 and spent 8 years to develop advanced equipment for hard disk drive and semiconductor industry with a focus on high throughput nanoscale inspection and production. In 2005, together with his former Bell Labs colleague, Eric Betzig, they learned about photoactivatable fluorescent proteins and invented PALM (photo-activated localization microscopy) to reveal details of cell structure beyond the diffraction limit. It was built in his La Jolla condo living room, tested at the National Institute of Health and perfected at Janelia Farms/Howard Hughes Medical Institute where he is extending PALM to a 3D super-resolution microscopy and exploring its application for cell biology research.  He also returned to electron microscopy and is developing 3D electron microscopy techniques for larger volume imaging of whole cells, tissue, and complete fly brains to revel its wiring diagram, as well as exploring modalities to correlate such electron microscopy with super-resolution microscopy.