Bert Hecht is Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Wurzburg. After studying physics at the University Konstanz, he joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Ruschlikon and worked in near-field optical microscopy and plasmonics. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Basel and then joined the Physical Chemistry Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology where he worked on the combination of single-molecule spectroscopy with scanning probe techniques. In 2001, he was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation research professorship at the University of Basel. His research interests comprise the enhancement of light-matter interaction on the nanometerscale.