Prof. em. Dr. Gianni Blatter

Johann W. (Gianni) Blatter was appointed Associate Professor at the ETH Zurich in 1993. Since 1996 he has been full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. From 2007 to 2013 he has chaired the physics department and served as the speaker of department heads at ETH (2009--2013). He is a delegate of the president since 1999 and a member of the ETH strategy commission since 2014.

Prof. Blatter was born on November 10, 1955 and is Swiss citizen (Brig-Glis and Ried-Brig, VS). He graduated from ETH Zurich and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1983 under the direction of T. M. Rice, for the investigation of atom scattering as a surface probe. After his Ph.D., he moved to the research laboratory of Brown Boveri Company (later Asea Brown Boveri) in Baden, Switzerland, where he investigated the non-linear transport properties of structured wide gap semiconductors. During a Post-Doc stay at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York, with J. W. Wilkins) his interest turned to mesoscopic physics (transport in small metal rings). In 1987, he returned to Asea Brown Boveri and conducted the theoretical research on the new high temperature superconductors. The early interest in the transport properties of ceramic superconductors soon gave way to investigations of the phenomenological properties of these strongly type II materials; his research work on Vortex Matter gained him the recognition as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1999) and was awarded the Abrikosov prize in 2017. In the course of his career, he contributed to a broad range of topics in condensed matter and statistical physics, with the theoretical proposals for superconducting quantum bits and studies on mesoscopic transport and quantum metrology deserving special mention.