Henry Hess is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineerung at Columbia University. His research interests include nanobiotechnology, biomaterials science, and synthetic biology. A particular focus of his work is the engineering of hybrid nanodevices which integrate biological and synthetic components.

Dr. Hess received a diploma in physics from the Technical University Berlin in 1996, and obtained his Dr. rer.nat. (summa cum laude) in experimental physics from the Free University of Berlin in 1999 under the guidance of Ludger Woeste. His postdoctoral studies where conducted from 2000 to 2002 at the Department of Bioengineering, University of Washington, where he also served as a Research Assistant Professor (2002-2005). From 2005 to 2009 he served as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the University of Florida. He received the Wolfgang Paul Award of the German Society for Mass Spectrometry (2000), the Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation (2000), the Philip Morris Forschungspreis (2005, together with his postdoctoral mentor Viola Vogel), the Distinguished Mentor Award of the UF/HHMI "Science for Life" program (2007), an invitation to the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative "Synthetic Biology" (2009), and was an invited speaker at the US Frontiers of Engineering Meeting 2010. Dr. Hess is serving as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions in Nanobioscience and as Member of the External Advisory Board of Nano Letters.

Most importantly, Henry tremendously enjoyed his graduate studies in the Woeste group and tries to keep the connection with German researchers as much as possible!