Prof. em. Dr. Jürg Beer

Juerg Beer holds the position of professor (Titularprofessor) at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the ETH in Zurich since 2003. In the department "Surface Waters" at EAWAG he is head of the research group "Radioactive Tracers".

Born in Solothurn in1949, Juerg Beer studied physics at the University of Berne. While working on his Ph. D. thesis under the supervision of Prof. H. Oeschger, he participated in the development of the accelerator mass spectrometer at the Institute for Nuclear Physics at ETH. In 1986, he joined Prof. W. Woelfli's group at ETH and in 1988 he was offered a position at EAWAG in the newly formed Department for Environmental Physics which was headed by Prof. D. Imboden.

Juerg Beer spent a year at the NCAR in Boulder, USA in 1994 and he spent three months at the University of Nagoya in Japan in 2003.

The main aim of his research group is to reconstruct and understand the causes of climate changes over the past 100,000 years by means of isotope methods. Cosmogenic radionuclides in natural archives such as ice, sediments and tree rings are the most important source of information, being used both as tracers to investigate the underlying processes as well as for dating.