Prof.Dr. Franz J. Giessibl holds the Chair for Quantum Nanoscience at University of Regensburg in Germany. He obtained his diploma in physics after studies at the Technical University of Munich and ETH Zürich. He was the PhD student of Nobel laureate Prof. Gerd Binnig with the IBM Physics Group Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians University where he built the first atomic force microscope (AFM) for ultrahigh vacuum and low temperatures. He continued his work on AFM at Park Scientific Instruments, a Stanford spinoff, where he established AFM as a surface science tool by obtaining for the first time the atomically resolved Si(111)-(7x7) reconstruction published in Science 267, 68 in 1995. During a two year break from science as a management consultant with McKinsey&Company, he invented the qPlus sensor, a new core for AFM, in his home laboratory and returned to academia. The qPlus sensor enabled transformative works in science since and Giessibl has been awarded ten international science prizes for his work on AFM so far, including the Keithley award of APS, the Feynman Prize of Nanotechnology, the Heinrich Rohrer Grand Medal and the NIMS award of Japan. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an International Fellow of the Japan Society of Vacuum and Surface Science and a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Art.