Prof. Dr. Günther Dissertori

In February 2022, Günther Dissertori took up the role of Rector of ETH Zurich and is thus responsible for teaching. The physicist grew up in South Tyrol and studied at the University of Innsbruck. From there, he moved to work as a doctoral student at CERN in Geneva, where he began his research career. In 2001, he was offered an assistant professorship at ETH Zurich, and six years later was made a full professor.

At CERN, he contributed to creating the CMS experiment on the large particle accelerator, one of the two experiments that made it possible to prove the existence of the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs and François Englert received the Nobel Prize for Physics for this in 2013. Together with ETH colleagues Christophorus Grab, Felicitas Pauss and Rainer Wallny, Dissertori helped pave the way for the discovery.

With his group, Dissertori also developed new positron emission tomography (PET) devices, including a cost-efficient brain PET scanner, which was brought to the market by the spin-off company Positrigo AG.

As a lecturer, his great enthusiasm for teaching is evidenced by his impressive collection of “Golden Owls”. The students in his department have bestowed on him the prize for good teaching as many as four times. Dissertori has furthermore received the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching.