Prof. em. Dr. Alexander J.B. Zehnder

Alexander Jakob Boris Zehnder is scientific director of the Alberta Water Reseach Institute (AWRI) in Canada and President of triple Z Ltd, a Switzerland based consulting company. He was President of the ETH Board from July 2004 to December 2008. Formerly he had been Director of the Federal Institute for Water Resources and Water Pollution Control (EAWAG) as from 1992, and was Professor of Environmental Biotechnology at ETH Zurich. He retired end of May 2008.

A. Zehnder was born on February 21, 1946 in Goldach SG. He studied natural sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). After graduation in 1971 he was a consultant for WHO in Rabat, Morocco, until 1973. He returned to ETH to pursue doctoral work and in 1976 he finished his PhD dissertation in the Department of Natural Sciences. After two years as a research associate in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Stanford University. The Agricultural University in Wageningen, Netherlands appointed him as Professor of Microbiology and as head of the Institute for Microbiology in 1982, and he remained there until his return to Switzerland and the ETH.