Dr. Michael Popall, born in 1955 in the most southern part of Germany, studied chemistry at the Technical University Munich. He received his PhD in 1986 in metal–organic chemistry, at same university.

In 1987 he went to Fraunhofer Institut für Silicatforschung (ISC) in Würzburg, Germany and changed from fundamental to applied contractual research with industry and established research on inorganic-organic sol-gel class-II hybrids for use in microelectronic, photonic as well as electrochemical applications.

With 24 years experience in applied materials research on Hybrids he is now head of ISC-International at Fraunhofer ISC.

His materials research is on organic–inorganic hybrids, ORMOCER®s, for optical, dielectric and electrochemical applications. Besides publications and patents in that research area, nowadays several of those materials are on the market.

He received the German Science Price in 2002 (Stifter foundation) for a European project on ORMOCER® based interconnection technology, and the NanoTech Future Award 2005 (Tokyo, Japan) in micromachining for ORMOCER® based micro-lens arrays.