Thomas W. Ebbesen is a physical chemist who was born in Oslo, Norway. He graduated from Oberlin College, USA, and then got his Ph.D. from P. & M. Curie University in Paris, France. He worked at the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory, the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan, and the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, before becoming a professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1999. He is currently the head of the Fondation Jean-Marie-Lehn (foundation for Frontier Research in Chemistry) and of the Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies, that he founded in 2012 and where he holds the chair of physical chemistry of light-matter interactions. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and a foreign member of the French Academy of Science. Among other recognitions, he received the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his transformative contributions to nano-optics, and more recently, in 2019, the gold medal of the CNRS, which is the most prestigious french scientific prize.

See also his Wikipedia page.