Joachim Frank (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːaxɪm ˈfʁaŋk] ⓘ) HonFRMS; born September 12, 1940) is a German-American biophysicist at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate.

He is regarded as the founder of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson.

degree in physics at the University of Freiburg (1963)[3] and his Diplom under Walter Rollwagen's mentorship at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with the thesis "Untersuchung der Sekundärelektronen-Emission von Gold am Schmelzpunkt" (Investigation of secondary electron emission of gold at its melting point) (1967), Frank obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich for graduate studies in Walter Hoppe's lab at the Max Planck Institut für Eiweiss- und Lederforschung (now Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry) with the dissertation Untersuchungen von elektronenmikroskopischen Aufnahmen hoher Auflösung mit Bilddifferenz- und Rekonstruktionsverfahren[4] (Investigations of high-resolution electron micrographs using image difference and reconstruction methods) (1970).

As a Harkness postdoctoral fellow, he had the opportunity to study for two years in the United States: with Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; with Robert M. Glaeser at Donner Lab, University of California, Berkeley and with Benjamin M. Siegel at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

[5][6][7] In the fall of 1972 he returned briefly to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried as research assistant, working on the theory of partial coherence in electron microscopy,[8] then, in 1973, he joined the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge as Senior Research Assistant under Vernon Ellis Cosslett.