Müller, Ralph, Prof. Dr.

Curriculum vitae

Ralph Müller is currently a Professor of Biomechanics and the Director of the Institute for Biomechanics at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he serves as the Deputy Department Head.

Born on May 5, 1964, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he studied electrical engineering at ETH Zurich, where he also received his doctoral degree in 1994. Subsequently, he served as a project manager for the micro-computed tomography project of the European Union Concerted Action BIOMED1. In 1996, he moved to Boston, where before his return to Switzerland he served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the Associate Director of the Orthopedic Biomechanics Laboratory. Between 2000 and 2006, he was an SNF Professor of Bioengineering at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, and between 2006 and 2011 he was first an Associate and then Full Professor of Biomechanics at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich.

The research he has completed and is currently pursuing employs state-of-the-art biomechanical testing and simulation techniques as well as novel bioimaging and visualization strategies for biological tissues. He is especially interested in image-guided failure assessment of porous microstructures and has developed different techniques to nondestructively monitor microstructure and mechanical behavior in three-dimensional biological and tissue engineered constructs in a time-lapsed fashion. Today, these methods are successfully employed for the quantitative assessment of structure function relationships in tissue healing, growth and adaptation. His approaches are now often used for precise phenotypic characterization of tissue response in mammalian genetics, stem cell-based tissue engineering and mechanobiology.

He is an author of over 900 refereed publications and abstracts in international scientific journals and conference proceedings. He has received a number of awards, including the Inaugural John Haddad Young Investigator Award (1998) from the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) and Advances in Mineral Metabolism (AIMM) as well as the Promising Young Scientist Award (1999) from the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB). In 2004, he was named Young Leader by the American-Swiss Foundation and in 2007, he received the Publication Group Award from the German Academy of Osteological and Rheumatological Sciences. He is also active as an organizer of international symposia and working groups as well as an editor and reviewer for scientific journals and funding agencies. He is a former President of the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB) and the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering (SSBE).

He is a co-organizer of the ETH program in Health Sciences and Technology and the graduate program in Biomedical Engineering. In 2008, he founded two spin-off companies, b-cube AG, providing services in the area of structural evaluation of porous biomaterials, and Pearltec AG, developing and marketing novel patient positioning systems for medical imaging procedures. A full curriculum vitae can be found here.