Georg Nagel (born 24 August 1953) is a German biophysicist and professor at the Department for Neurophysiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. His research is focused on microbial photoreceptors and the development of optogenetic tools. In 2026, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl Deisseroth andPeter Hegemann "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics."
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Early life and education
Georg Nagel studied biology and biophysics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt in 1988, working at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. As a postdoc, he worked at Yale University and Rockefeller University, US.
Career
From 1992 to 2004, Nagel headed an independent research group in the Department of Biophysical Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt. Since 2004, he is a professor at the University of Würzburg, Germany, first at the Department for Molecular Plant Physiology and Biophysics, since 2019 at the Department for Neurophysiology.