Peter Hegemann

Peter Hegemann is a German biophysicist, born in Münster in 1954, who holds the Hertie Senior Research Chair for Neurosciences and is professor of experimental biophysics at Humboldt University of Berlin. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at Münster and Munich and took his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, where he later led a research group before a professorship at the University of Regensburg. He is known for discovering channelrhodopsin, a light-gated ion channel that created the field of optogenetics, in which light controls the activity of chosen neurons. In 2026 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl Deisseroth and Georg Nagel.