[6] Subsequently, he attended one year of secondary education at the Nikolaus Lenau High School in Timișoara before leaving with his parents to West Germany in 1978.

From 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at the University of Turku (Finland) in the department for Medical Physics,[10] where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletion STED microscopy.

Since 2003 Hell has also been the leader of the department "Optical Nanoscopy division" at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and "non-budgeted professor" (apl.

Hell was the first to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, how one can decouple the resolution of the fluorescence microscope from diffraction and increase it to a fraction of the wavelength of light (to the nanometer scale).

For this achievement and its significance for other fields of science, such as the life-sciences and medical research, he received the 10th German Innovation Award (Deutscher Zukunftspreis) on 23 November 2006.