Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Prof. Joachim Frank was appointed Distinguished Affiliated Professor of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) yesterday. He also gave a ceremonial address and a lecture for students of his alma mater. Frank received his doctorate at TUM in 1970.
Joachim Frank, Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 for their groundbreaking work on the development of cryo-electron microscopy. This method, in which samples are cooled with liquid nitrogen, makes it possible to determine the three-dimensional shape of proteins under the electron microscope.
Joachim Frank completed his doctorate at TUM in 1970. In continuation of the work of his doctoral supervisor Prof. Walter Hoppe, he succeeded in developing a strategy that can calculate a three-dimensional image of the structure from many high-resolution, two-dimensional images of an electron microscope. Today, Joachim Frank is researching at the Columbia University in New York.