New assistant professor: Dr. Fabian Walter
Assistant professor Dr. Fabian Walter: SNF sponsorship chair with the ‘Glacial Hazard Monitoring with Seismology (GlaHMSeis)’ project. Prof. Fabian Walter took up his post at VAW in the spring of 2015.
Fabian Walter, born in 1978, a German national, studied physics at the University of Colorado in the USA between 1999 and 2004, then gained his doctorate in 2009 from ETH Zurich with a dissertation on ‘Seismic Activity on Gornergletscher during Gornersee Outburst Floods’. Between 2009 and 2014, Fabian Walter was a post-doctoral fellow at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (San Diego, USA), at the Swiss Earthquake Service of ETH Zurich and at the Institut des Sciences de la Terre (the Institute of Earth Sciences in Grenoble, France), where he conducted research in the fields of glacier seismology and glacier calving.
Fabian Walter’s teaching and research work in the field of physical glaciology specialising in glacier seismology, is an extremely valuable supplement to the glaciology work of VAW. ETH collaborates with many institutions, for example the Swiss earthquakes service, the institute for geophysics and the WSL (the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research). Fabian Walter also works at international level with scientists in the USA, France and Germany.
With Fabian Walter’s appointment, the Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering Department (D-BAUG) has intensified its collaboration with the Department for Earth Sciences (D-ERDW), covering new aspects in its research into protection against natural hazards.