Dr. Volker Deckert is appointed as a Full-Professor for Physical Chemistry at the Friedrich-SchillerUniversity in Jena and holds a joint position as a department head at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology, also in Jena. He obtained hisDiploma and his PhD from theUniversity of Wurzburg (Germany),working in the field of Raman difference spectroscopy and instrument development. He was a postdoc at University of Tokyo and the Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology in Kawasaki, where he worked on non-linear and time-resolved laser spectroscopy. During his habilitation at the ETH Zurich, he started working on near-field optical spectroscopy, a subject he pursued at his next positions positions in Dresden and Dortmund and also at his current position in Jena.