Joachim Frank is a professor at Columbia University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in 1970 from the Technical University in Munich and, in 1975, joined the Wadsworth Center in Albany as a senior research scientist. In 2008, he moved to New York to assume his current position. His lab has developed techniques of electron microscopy and single-particle reconstruction of biological macromolecules. Frank has applied this technique of visualization to explore the structure and dynamics of the ribosome during protein synthesis. He received the 2014 Franklin Award for Life Sciences and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson.