(1940-11-09) November 9, 1940 (age 84) in Krefeld) is a German biophysicist and director emeritus of the Department of Biophysical Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics.
He was a Heisenberg fellow from 1979 to 1983, when he became head of an independent working group at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt/Main.
He has also been a director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics since 1993, and a senior investigator at the Cluster of Excellence Frankfurt (CEF) since 2008.
With Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann, who were attempting to identify the proteins that allow Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a green alga, to move toward light using photocurrents, Bamberg was part of the first research team to isolate and characterize channelrhodopsin 2 (ChR2).
“We had a hard time trying to convince people that it was true,” he told Nature later, but "Before we published the first papers [showing that algal proteins could generate currents in eukaryotic cells], we applied for a patent where we gave to our fantasy a free run about the possible applications of channelrhodopsins on electrically excitable cells, including some biomedical applications.”[4] In 2005, Bamberg and Nagel worked with Ed Boyden, Karl Deisseroth, and Feng Zhang to demonstrate that this light-gated channel could be used as an actuator to control neural activity, helping to lay the foundations for the study of optogenetics.