Brief Biography
I was born in Zurich, Switzerland, at a time when danger loomed from the North. For safety, I became assistant-goat-herd in Stechelberg, at the foot of the majestic Jungfrau mountain, at the age of four. My first real job, the following year, was to deliver items from my parents' grocery store to the villas of ladies, who had forgotten to buy them. My school years were horror filled because one had to spell constantly; something I do not know how to do in any of the languages I know. Unfortunately, there were never any questions on tests about the content of Karl May’s adventure novels. What counted was homework, which I forgot, daily.
As an extra on the stage of Zurich, I learned various things about language, literature, performing and vanity. In school, people did not know about dyslexia, at the time. So, I was excommunicated from the noble class of intellectuals, as a delinquent, who annoyed his teacher by exceeding single-handedly the sum of orthographic mistakes made by all his class mates combined. The expulsion from Gymnasium, I answered by escaping to Paris with forged documents. Nevertheless, after a year of private preparation, I passed the national Maturitaets-Exam with flying colors.
At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where I studied Earth Science to the level of a Diploma, there was no challenge. I earned my PhD from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where the studies were more difficult and far more informative.
As a post-doc, I worked at Lamont-Doherty Observatory of Columbia University, New York. For the following two decades, I was Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Fellow of CIRES. To teach my three children how to ski in the Rocky Mountains was one of the most enjoyable projects of my life. My last decade as Professor, I spent occupying the Wadati chair at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. To build a house from the foundations up, with my son Ben, was perhaps my most successful project. I have worked as Visiting Scientist in Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Mexico and India.
Today, I am Director of the World Agency for Planetary Monitoring and Earthquake Risk Reduction in Geneva. Our main project aims at estimating the number of fatalities, and injured within an hour after any earthquake, worldwide. We provide this informationto international rescue agencies, such that they can decide whether or not to mobilize and offer help to developing countries.
For the last ten years, I have worked on the novels and short stories that have accumulated in my brain.
