Appointment of apostolic nuncio in Croatia

Appointment of ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Appointment of apostolic nuncio in Croatia

The Holy Father has appointed Archbishop Giorgio Lingua, of the titular see of Tuscania and currently apostolic nuncio in Cuba, as apostolic nuncio in Croatia.

Appointment of ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences

The Holy Father has appointed as ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences the Distinguished Professor Stefan Walter Hell, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and director of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Federal Republic of Germany.

Professor Stefan Walter Hell

Born in Arad, Romania, on 23 December 1962, Professor Hell was awarded a research doctorate in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1990. He then worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory from 1991 to 1993, as a senior researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, from 1993 to 1996, and as a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford in 1994.

Since 2002 he has served as director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and in addition, since 2017, as director of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg.

He has developed super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, which enables details to be displayed with a level of precision dozens of times higher, reaching a resolution of a few nanometres; microscopes have thus become nanoscopes. He has been awarded numerous prizes for this, including the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014. He is married and has four children.