Hartmut Michel is a German biochemist and Nobel Laureate. He was born 18 July 1948 in Ludwigsburg.

In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.
He received the Nobel Prize jointly with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber in 1988.
Between 1982 and 1985, the three scientists used X-ray crystallography to determine the exact arrangement of the more than 10,000 atoms that make up the protein complex.
Since 1987 he is director of the Molecular Membrane Biology department at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and professor of biochemistry at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University there.