Walter Steurer

Walter Steurer has been full Professor of Crystallography at the Laboratory of Crystallography of the ETH Zurich since October 1, 1993.

Born in Vienna, Austria on December 24, 1950, Walter Steurer studied chemistry at the University of Vienna. After finishing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Hans Nowotny at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, he moved, in 1980, to the University of Munich, Germany, where he worked as a research assistant and lecturer. In 1987 he concluded his habilitation thesis in the field of crystallography and mineralogy. In 1990 he got the Victor-Moritz-Goldschmid Award of the Deutsche Mineralogische Gesellschaft (DMG) for his contributions to the higher-dimensional structure analysis. His research topics were uncommon crystals and their phase transitions, and included incommensurably modulated structures, quasicrystals and polytypes. For a short period, from 1992 until 1993, he was professor of crystallography at the University of Hanover, Germany. After rejecting a call to the University of Hamburg, Germany, he has been full professor of crystallography at the ETH and University of Zurich since the fall of 1993.

At present, Walter Steurer's research topics comprise structural studies of aperiodic crystals and their phase transformations, the modeling of order/disorder phenomena, the measurement of thermoelastic tensors of single crystals, X-ray holography and higher-dimensional crystallography.