Eric Betzig

Happy birthday to Nobel Prizer winner Eric Betzig! He was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy” along with Stefan Hell and fellow Cornell alum William E. Moerner. Betzig was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and studied physics at Caltech. He went on to gain a MS and PhD in Applied and Engineering physics at Cornell University. Betzig then worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Semiconductor Physics Research Department. In 1996, Betzig left academia to become vice president of research and development at Ann Arbor Machine Company. Here he developed Flexible Adaptive Servohydraulic Technology (FAST). Betzig then returned to the field of microscopy, developing photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) in the living room of his old Bell Labs collaborator, Harald Hess; and in 2006 he joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus as a group leader to work on developing super high-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques. You can read more about his achievements at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2014/betzig-facts.html

Date in History: 13 January 1960