Heinrich Rohrer was born in 1933, in Buchs, St. Gallen, Switzerland, the son of Hans Heinrich Rohrer, a distributor of manufactured goods, and Katharina Ganpenbein Rohrer. He received his Ph.D. in physics in from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His doctoral research involved superconductivity.

In 1963, Rohrer joined the staff of the research laboratory of International Business Machines (IBM) in Zurich, eventually becoming manager of the physics department as well as an IBM Fellow. Rohrer has remained at the IBM lab throughout his career. In 1961, Rohrer married Rose-Marie Eggar; the couple had two daughters.

After joining IBM, Rohrer expanded his research in physics beyond superconductivity, investigating magnetic fields and critical phenomena. He became interested in the little-understood and complex atomic structures of the surfaces of materials. While electron microscopes had been developed to probe the internal arrangements of atoms in materials, attempts to uncover the very different...