Tjaart Krüger is an Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Pretoria. He completed a PhD in Biophysics (cum laude) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in The Netherlands, after which he returned to South Africa to establish biophysics research at the University of Pretoria. His research focusses mainly on the primary processes of photosynthesis, which he investigates using various laser spectroscopy techniques and some theoretical approaches. He is particularly interested in the design principles of photosynthetic light-harvesting complexes and how these principles may be applied to improve the design and performance of organic solar cells. Another interest is to find ways to control light-harvesting processes using tools such as shaped light and metallic nanoparticles.  He has published over 50 papers, many of which appeared in very high impact journals, 2 book chapters, an advanced textbook on optical spectroscopy, and several popular science articles. He has received numerous awards, including UP’s Exceptional Young Researcher’s Award (2018) and the Royal Academy of South Africa’s Meiring Naude Medal (2019). He is a member of the South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS), where he served on the Executive Committee in 2021-2022, and an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Since 2014 he has been the chair of the South African Biophysics Initiative.