Prof. Dr. Michael SCHAEPMAN

President of the University of Zurich

Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Michael Schaepman (b. 1966) studied geography, experimental physics, and informatics at the University of Zurich and earned his doctoral degree at the Department of Geography of UZH 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 Department of Geography (Remote Sensing Laboratories) at the University of Zurich 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. As Vice President for Veterinary Medicine and Science, he has been responsible, among other things, for the Research, Innovation and Academic Career Development division since August 2017. Since 2018 his position was Vice President of Research, and since August 1, 2020 he is serving as president of the University of Zurich.