ASHBURN, Va. (AP) — One of three newly announced Nobel Prize winners plies his trade in northern Virginia.

Fifty-four-year-old Eric Betzig has worked at the Ashburn campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2005.

He has spent much of his career working to develop powerful microscopes, though he took a mid-career break for several years to work in his father’s machine tool company.

On Wednesday, he received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a microscope that allows scientists to view living cells at a molecular level, at resolutions previously thought unattainable. Unlike electron microscopes, Betzig’s microscope can be used to look at living cells.

Betzig, in Munich when the announcement was made, said his reaction is a mix of happiness and fear, because he doesn’t want his life to change.

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