Gernot Kostorz

see CV

Gernot Kostorz served as full Professor of Physics at the Institute of Applied Physics at the ETH Zurich from April 1, 1980 until his retirement on March 31, 2006. He was head of the Materials Faculty 1984/1986 and head of the Department of Physics 1996/1998.

Gernot Kostorz, a German citizen, was born on March 9, 1941 in Kattowitz/Upper Silesia. He studied Physics at the University of Göttingen where he worked toward his diploma and doctoral (Dr.rer.nat.) degrees on the plasticity of crystals under Professor Peter Haasen at the Institute of Metal Physics. From 1968 to 1971 he held postdoctoral and Research Associate positions at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, USA. In 1971 he joined the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, where he took part in developing neutron scattering methods for the investigation of crystal defects and phase transitions. From 1974 to 1978, he taught courses on Plasticity and Physical Metallurgy at the University of Grenoble. For two years (1978 to 1980), he was a Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Metal Research in Stuttgart. His research and teaching focused on the relationship between the microstructure and properties of real solids. During his twenty-six years of service at the ETH, more than fifty doctoral students, numerous postdocs, guest professors, and guest scientists were able to perform successful research work. He was a Guest Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory in 1977 and again in 1986, an Academic Scholar at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1995, a Guest Professor at the Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic in 1996, and at the University of Vienna, Austria in 2005. He is an author or co-author of many publications and (co-)edited more than twenty books and conference volumes. He has been an honorary member of the Metals Science Society (MSS) of the Czech Republic (1996), the Federation of European Materials Societies (FEMS, 2003), and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde (DGM, 2004). In 2005, he received the "Heyn Denkmünze" of the DGM for his contributions to the introduction of neutron scattering in materials research.

In 1993 and 1994, Gernot Kostorz was President of the Federation of European Materials Societies. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the (at the time) eight journals of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr, http://journals.iucr.org/) from 2005 till 2012 and for many years until 2016 as a Co-Editor of "Journal of Applied Crystallography".  Until the end of 2008, he was also the Special Issues Editor of the journal "Materials Science and Engineering A".  From 2004 till 2022, he served as the General Secretary of the Swiss Association of University Professors. In 2022, he completed his MA in Musicology, Modern History, and Philosophy at the University of Zurich.

Gernot Kostorz was married to Dorothea Kostorz, née Rogge, in 1966. His wife deceased in 2021. Their two daughters (1971, 1973) are living and working in Switzerland.