Karsten König's Biography

Karsten König, Professor, Saarland University

Karsten König is C4 Full Professor and Head of the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technologies at the Saarland University, Germany (www.blt.uni-saarland.de). He is also founder and president of the company JenLab GmbH with facilities in Jena and Saarbruecken (www.jenlab.de). He gained the PhD degree in physics as well as the habilitation degree in cell biology from the University Jena. Prof. König published about 500 scientific papers (2x Nature) in the field of biophotonics and laser material processing, filed 25 patents, and pioneered fluorescence lifetime imaging, femtosecond laser nanoprocessing, femtosecond laser transfection, and clinical multiphoton tomography.
His work was awarded with the SPIE Prism Award, the Leibinger Innovation Award, the Pascal Rol Award, the Award of the International Society of Skin Pharmacology and Physiology, the Technology for the Human Being Award of the Fraunhofer Society, the
Kortum Motivation Prize, the Feulgen Prize, The New Economy Award, and the IAIR Award as European Man of the Year 2014. In 2015 he became a fellow of the International Society SPIE. His company JenLab sponsors the JenLab Young Investigator Award ($2000) that is presented during the annual Photonics West Conference in San Francisco as well as the Skin Imaging Award ($2000). Karsten König focuses on biomedical and technical applications of femtosecond laser technology. His current projects include Sub-100nm-Nanomachining with 10 Femtosecond Laser Pulses, Optical Reprogramming by laser transfection, Testing the biosafety of nanoparticles in cosmetic products, and Multiphoton Tomography of astronauts to understand skin ageing effects in space.