International Relations Office
Universitas 21 Presidential Symposium 2020 Keynote Speech and Expert Talk
Professor Thomas Stocker Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland President of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research
Thomas Stocker was born in Zurich and obtained a PhD in Natural Sciences of ETH Zurich in 1987. He held research positions at University College London, McGill University (Montreal), Columbia University (New York) and University of Hawai'i (Honolulu). Since 1993 he has been Professor of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern.
His research encompasses the development of climate models of intermediate complexity, modelling past and future climate change, in particular abrupt climate change and its effects on the ocean, and the reconstruction of greenhouse gas concentrations based on ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. This has resulted in the definitive carbon dioxide and methane records of the past 800,000 years.
From 2008 to 2015, he served as Co-Chair of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that provided the scientific foundation of the Paris Agreement.
Thomas Stocker holds honorary doctorates from ETH Zurich and the University of Versailles and has received numerous awards for his work. He is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Germany, and received the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist in 2017.
Professor Michael Schaepman Vice President Research, University of Zurich (UZH) Professor of Remote Sensing, Department of Geography, UZH, Switzerland
Michael Schaepman studied geography, experimental physics, and informatics at the University of Zurich and earned his doctoral degree at the UZH Department of Geography in 1998. Following postdoctoral work at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA, he returned to the UZH Department of Geography in 2000 to head up a research group.
In 2003, Michael Schaepman was appointed professor of geographic information science at the Department of Environmental Sciences at Wageningen University (Netherlands), where as of 2005, he was academic head of the Center for Geoinformation. He has been professor of remote sensing at the UZH Department of Geography (Remote Sensing Laboratories) since 2009.
His research priorities include Earth observation, remote sensing, and spectroscopy to measure biodiversity from space. Michael Schaepman was appointed Vice Dean and then Dean of the Faculty of Science in 2014 and 2016, respectively. Since August 2017 he has been a member of the Executive Board of the University and responsible for the areas of research, innovation and academic career development.