Prof. R. Schwarzenbach

Curriculum vitae

René Schwarzenbach is Full Professor of Environmental Chemistry at ETH Zurich. Currently he is the head of the Department of Environmental Sciences (D-UWIS) and of the school domain of Earth, Environmental and Natural Resources, (S-ENETH) at ETH Zurich. He is also president of Division IV of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Born in December 1945, René Schwarzenbach earned his diploma degree in 1970 from the Chemistry Department at ETH Zurich where he also got his Ph.D. in 1973. He spent two postdoctoral years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (USA). In 1977 he accepted a position at the EAWAG, where he headed the department for interdisciplinary limnological research for several years and also served on the board of directors until April 2005. In 1984 he completed his habilitation at ETH Zurich, where he was elected as full professor in 1989.  In 1992 he was awarded the Körber Prize, together with four colleagues from Germany, France and Switzerland. In 2000 he was elected as an original member of the ISI Highly Cited Researchers Database, in 2001 he won the SETAC Environmental Education Award, and in 2006 he became the first person outside the USA to receive the Award for "Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology” of the American Chemical Society.
The research, teaching, and consulting activities of his group focus primarily on the distribution, fate and effects of organic pollutants in the natural environment.

The research addresses fundamental chemical as well as multidisciplinary system-oriented aspects. In his teaching he aims to build bridges between the molecular world and macroscopic systems. His textbook "Environmental Organic Chemistry" that he authored together with two colleagues from MIT and ETH Zurich, and that won the "Chemistry Book of the Year Award" of the Association of American Publishers in 1994, has established itself as the standard text in the field of environmental organic chemistry. The second, completely revised and expanded edition of The Book has appeared in 2003.