Hartmut Michel

Professor Hartmut Michel has been a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, since 1987. He studied biochemistry in Tübingen and Munich, and received his PhD from the University of Würzburg in 1977 for work in bioenergetics. He is a member or foreign member of many learned societies, including the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Science), the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (London).

In 1988, Prof Michel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber, “for the determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre”. He has since expanded his work onto other membrane proteins, often of medical importance. He has been most successful with secondary active transporters, which are membrane-integrated proteins that enable the specific transport of substances like nutrients and building blocks across biological membranes.