Prof. Dr. Niklaus Zimmermann

Niklaus E. Zimmermann was born in 1963 in Bern (Switzerland) and studied plant ecology at the University of Bern, Switzerland (1983-1989). He received his Ph.D. degree in Plant Ecology (Prof. Dr. F. Kienast) in 1996. During three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Utah State University, Logan, USA, he worked on forest dynamics modelling and species distribution modelling with Prof. David W. Roberts. In 1999, he returned to Switzerland, and took a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. In 2001, he was appointed a permanent position and research project leader for ecological modelling at WSL. In 2006, he was elected as head of the research unit "Landscape Dynamics", which grew to four research groups and included ca. 100 scientists, postdocs, Ph.D. students, technicians and visiting scientists. He has resigned from this research unit leader position in 2013 and became a senior scientist at WSL. In 2014, he was awarded adjunct professor for macroecology at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems at ETH. Since 2007, Niklaus Zimmermann is a member of the directorate of WSL. Since 2012, he is a member of the science commission of InfoFlora, the Swiss National Floristic Data Center. Since 2014, he is a member of the C2SM Steering Board, the ETH center for climate systems modelling, in which he represents WSL.