Thomas Peter

With his research group, Tom Peter investigates the fundamentals of aerosols and clouds, their physical processes and chemical reactions, and their influence on the composition of the air. The group works both experimentally with laboratory experiments to study the thermodynamics and kinetics of individual trapped aerosol particles or ensembles of particles under atmospheric conditions, and theoretically and using physico-chemical models to study microscale aerosol processes and their impact on atmospheric chemistry up to the global scale. The group runs its own global chemistry-climate model. It also regularly participates in field measurement campaigns and is successful in instrument development for balloon-borne aerosol, cloud, and water vapor measurements, which are used hundreds of times worldwide.

Tom Peter was Full Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Institute for Atmosphere and Climate at ETH Zurich since January 1999.  He retired in January 2023. Born in 1958 in Marburg, Germany, he studied physics at the University of Marburg, the Technical University of Munich and the University of Maryland. In 1988, he received his Ph.D. with a theoretical thesis in the field of heavy-ion-induced inertial confinement fusion. In 1990, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, where he became head of the group for heterogeneous chemistry and microphysics of atmospheric aerosols in 1995. In the same year, he was appointed coordinator for aerosol research in the German Ozone Research Program and member of the steering committee of the high-flying research aircraft "Geophysica". He has been a co-author on several occasions of international scientific reports on the evolution of the stratospheric ozone layer. From 1997 to 2012, he was a member of the Scientific Steering Group of SPARC, a core project of the World Climate Research Program, of which he was co-chair from 2007 to 2012 (with Ted Shepherd). In the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH, he served as Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee from 2004 to 2012, and as Head of Department from 2013 to 2017. He has been a member of the Joint Steering Committee for the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) since 2015. He was member of the ETH Research Commission from 2018 to 2022.