Biophysical Society Bulletin | March 2022

Biophysicist in Profile

Jörg Enderlein Areas of Research: Single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy, superresolution optical microscopy, and nano-optics

Institution Georg August University

At-a-Glance

Jörg Enderlein became interested in physics from an early age, dreaming of becoming an astrophys- icist. As his career progressed, he realized that the biophysical universe held just as much interest, and it is still keeping him captivated after many years.

Jörg Enderlein

Jörg Enderlein , professor of physics at Georg August Universi- ty in Göttingen, Germany grew up in East Berlin. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father worked as a lawyer. “My parents were not professionally involved in any scientific activity,” he shares, “however, both were highly edu- cated and supported my scientific interest in any way possible by giving me books and popular science magazines, and by enabling me to attend a special high school with enhanced natural sciences curricula.” Enderlein became interested in natural sciences at an early age. His parents gave him a popular physics book when he was 13 years old, and he knew then that he wanted to be- come a physicist. He attended the Heinrich-Hertz secondary school, a top East German school with special emphasis on natural sciences. “From there, I went to Odessa in the former Soviet Union (today Ukraine) and started studying physics at Ilya Mechnikov University there, from 1981 to 1986,” he recounts. “After that, I returned to Germany and obtained my PhD in physical chemistry from Humboldt University in Berlin.” After completing his PhD, he worked for three years in Berlin as a research scientist with PicoQuant, a then-newly-founded company specializing in pulsed laser systems and high-speed electronics for scientific research. “My transition to biophys- ics began when I learned about the spectacular work by the late Richard Keller about the detection and spectroscopy of single fluorescent molecules, which triggered a technological revolution in biophysics. This work was a huge methodologi- cal breakthrough and started the whole field of single-mole- cule biophysics. When I learned about his work around 1990, I was instantly fascinated and completely switched my field of research,” Enderlein recalls. “At that time, the spectacular results by the Keller group initiated a huge German-wide research initiative that tried to catch up with these achieve- ments and to develop single-molecule biophysics. PicoQuant was part of this research initiative with the expressed goal to develop the cutting-edge technology (pulsed picosecond sol- id-state lasers, high-speed electronics for time-resolved sin- gle-photon counting, ultrasensitive detectors) for single-mol-

ecule biophysics, and I joined them as a research scientist responsible for the scientific aspects of their activities.” Following his time with PicoQuant, he joined Keller’s lab at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a postdoc- toral fellow. “During my postdoc,” he explains, “I developed extensive models and programs for single-molecule fluo- rescence spectroscopy, in particular for fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy, and applied these models and programs to the single molecule analysis of DNA.” In 1997, Enderlein joined Regensburg University in Regens- burg, Germany as an assistant professor. Then in 2001, he became a group leader at Forschungszentrum Jülich, the big- gest research lab in Germany. “My career has been far from linear. After my PhD, I held in total seven positions in different institutions, and before becoming a group leader at the For- schungszentrum Jülich, there was never a full guarantee that I could continue forever my academic career,” he shares. “This situation of longtime uncertainty has become even worse for the younger generation of research scientists in Germa- ny. Dwindling base funding has more and more eliminated permanent staff scientist positions in German universities, which makes an academic career extremely insecure, be- cause before getting an appointment to a full professorship in Germany (typically around the age of 45), there is absolutely no guarantee that one can stay in science. I could survive this long period of career insecurity only with my infinite enthusi- asm for doing physics.” Following his time at Forschungszentrum Jülich, he was appointed full professor of biophysical chemistry at Eber- hard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany before moving in 2008 to his current position as full professor in the physics department of Georg August University. “In 2010, my team developed a new spectroscopic-microscopic technique, Met- al-Induced Energy Transfer Spectroscopy and Imaging, which exploits plasmonics for achieving exceptional spatial reso- lution in optical imaging,” he explains. “Since January 2021, my research is funded by an Advanced Researcher European

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