Richard R. Ernst was full Professor of Physical Chemistry since 1976. He directed a research group devoted to magnetic resonance spectroscopy, was director of the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry at the ETH Zurich and retired in 1998.
He was born as a citizen 1933 in Winterthur. He finished 1962 his studies at the ETH Zurich with a dissertation on nuclear magnetic resonance in the discipline of physical chemistry. 1963 he joined Varian Associates as a scientist and developed Fourier-transform NMR, noise decoupling, and several other techniques. 1968 he returned to ETH Zurich, became 1968 Lecturer, 1970 Assistant Professor, 1972 Associate Professor, 1976 Full Professor, and retired 1998. Since 1968, he was head of a research group concentrating on methodological developments in liquid state and solid state NMR. He developed two-dimensional NMR and many novel pulse techniques. He contributed to the development of medical magnetic resonance tomo-graphy, and in collaboration with Professor Kurt Wüthrich to the development of the NMR structure determination of biopolymers in solution. Lately, he was involved in the study of intramolecular dynamics.
In addition he was engaged in numerous activities. He was president of the Reseach Council of ETH Zurich and he is presently, among other duties, a member of the Swiss Science Council, of the COST Committee, of the Foundation Marcel Benoist, of the Hochschulrat of the Technische Universität Munich, and Vicepresident of the Board of Bruker AG, Fällanden. He is on the editorial board of 10 scientific journals.
He received numerous honours, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1991), the Wolf Prize for Chemistry (1991), the Horwitz Prize (1991), and the Marcel Benoist Prize (1986). He received honorary doctors degrees of ETH Lausanne, Technische Universität Munich, Universität Zurich, University Antwerpen, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, and University Montpellier. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, of the Royal Academy of Sciences, London, of the Deutsche Akademie Leopoldina, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and honorary member of many further societies.
Born May 5, 1966 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland. Undergraduate and Master studies in biochemistry at the ETH Zurich. Since 1998 science editor at major Swiss newspapers ("Weltwoche", "NZZ am Sonntag", “Tages-Anzeiger”). Since September 2009 head of the science section at "Tages-Anzeiger". Since 2018 working as a freelance journalist and author. Main topics are scientific research, science policy and historical topics, especially from the field of technology and science history.
