was born Feb 26th 1961 in Hamburg. From 1980 to 1986 he studied physics in Hamburg and Göttingen. His master thesis was on high energy physics. In 1986 he moved to Frankfurt to work on his Ph.D. thesis in Ernst Bamberg's group at Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysics. He defended his thesis about light induced proton transport of bacteriorhodopsin in April 1989.

Then he spent a year as a postdoc in Santa Barbara, California, with Paul Hansma, learning to use the newly developed atomic force microscope. In 1990, back in Germany at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysics with Ernst Bamberg, he studied biological objects with the atomic force microscope. In this period the work on surfaces in particular on surface forces became a central issue. He habilitated in 1995.

In 1996 he went to the institute for physical chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz as a C3 (Associate) Professor. There his main focus was the physics and chemistry of interfaces. 2000 he followed a call to the University of Siegen as a C4 (Full) Professor for physical chemistry. Here, the interest in nano- and microchemistry - chemistry at the small scale, started.

In 2002 he joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research. Hans-Jürgen Butt is married and has three children.