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Josef A. Käs (born October 14, 1961 in Munich, Germany) is a German biophysicist. He is a Professor at Leipzig University.

Life and work
Josef Alfons Käs studied at the Technische Universität München, where he also completed his PhD thesis about the reptation model in Polymer physics in 1993. From 1993 to 1996, he was postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Prof. Paul Janmey, before he became assistant, associate and then full professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1996 to 2002.

In 2001, Josef A. Käs and Jochen Guck invented the Optical stretcher, a tool for the contact-free investigation of cell rheology using pure light forces. In the same year, he was also awarded the Wolfgang Paul Award, the highest scientific prize in Germany at that time, by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Consequently, he became full professor at Leipzig University in 2002 and head of the Institute for Experimental Physics I in 2008.

He is one of the organizers of the annual Physics of cancer conference in Leipzig and co-founder of RS Zelltechnik, a company that made optical stretchers commercially available.

Honors

 * ICMB Fellow, Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin (1999-2003)
 * Distinguished Lecturer, SigmaXi (2000-2003)
 * Wolfgang Paul Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2001)
 * Finalist, Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas (2006)
 * American Physical Society Fellow (2014)
 * Full member of Saxon Academy of Sciences (2014)