Prof. Novotny earned his Dipl. El-Ing (M.S. in Electrical Engineering) in 1992 and his Dr. sc. techn. (Doctor of Technical Sciences) in 1996, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. His doctoral research was in close collaboration with the IBM Research Laboratory in Switzerland and dealt with theoretical questions in near-field optics. After three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, working on new schemes of near-field optical microscopy and single molecule spectroscopy, Prof. Novotny joined the faculty of the Institute of Optics in 1999 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003 and full Professor in 2007. He holds joint appointments in Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Professor Novotny is the author of "Principles of Nano-Optics", published by Cambridge University Press.