Career brief

 After finishing the master's degree in geography I completed a post graduate course in "water management and protection" at the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Resources and Pollution Control and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zürich and Dübendorf). Later I was working as a consulting engineer at Rytec AG (Münsingen, Berne) in the field of municipal waste and energy technology before writing a Ph.D. thesis at the Institute of Geography of the University of Zürich in 1995. I worked for the Department of Ecology (soil protection) of the Canton Lucerne between 1992 and 2005. Since 1998 I am employed at the Institute of Geography of the University of Zürich as a Senior Assistant (soil science). In the years 2000-2002, I made a Post-Doc stage at the ISSDS (Istituto Sperimentale per lo Studio e la Difesa del Suolo, Firenze) and worked on the characterisation and identification of clay minerals in soils. For the last four years I have been project coordinator of a multidisciplinary research programme in the high alpine zone (Spatio-temporal information on rapidly changing climate-sensitive high-mountain environments as a strategic tool for communication, analysis, participative planning and management in the intensely developed tourist region of the Upper Engadine). I have recently obtained the ‘Venia legendi’ (habilitation) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Zurich. Since 2005 I am furthermore the head of the geochronology laboratory. In 2006, I was a guest lecturer in soil science at the University of Palermo. Since 2006 I am also teaching at the University of Applied Sciences (Wädenswil) and at the UNITRE (Lucerne). In 2007 I made a research stay at the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen (Scotland), in 2008 a stay at the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, and in 2011 a stay at the Department of Geography, Northern University of Iowa, USA.