President's International Advisory Council

Olaf Kübler

Former President, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich
Former President, Director, Society in Science: The Branco Weiss Fellowship, Zürich, Switzerland

Dr. Kübler served two terms as President of ETH Zürich, from 1997 to 2005. As President of ETH Zürich, Dr. Kübler oversaw generation change and general faculty renewal, placed special emphasis on internationalization, and implemented a comprehensive campus expansion and upgrading program. Two thirds of the faculty were newly appointed during his tenure as President, more than half of international origin. The curricular format was completely converted from the traditional continental European to the international – Bologna – standard, and English was adopted as the medium of graduate instruction.

Since 2006, Dr. Kübler has been Director of “Society in Science: The Branco Weiss Fellowship” advocating a fresh approach in research and education dedicated to exploring new avenues in the relationship between science and society, and awarding fellowships of up to five years to outstanding young scientists.

Dr. Kübler is chair of the international scientific advisory boards of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. He is a Trustee of the National University of Singapore. Beyond academia, Dr. Kübler is partner of Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG and also serves on its Supervisory Council.

Dr. Kübler has published across a broad range of areas, including theoretical physics, structural biology and biological image processing, medical image analysis, and computer vision. A 1992 paper he co-authored, Nonlinear Anistoropic Filtering of MRI Data, was the most frequently cited paper in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging of that year.

Olaf Kübler graduated with a degree in theoretical physics from ETH Zürich in 1967, and received his PhD in the same field from the University of Heidelberg in 1970. In 1972, Dr Kübler joined the Institute for Cell Biology at ETH to set up the digital processing of high resolution electron microscope images of biological structures. In 1979, he became Professor of Image Sciences in the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) and founded the Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL) of ETH, working on the computer-based interpretation of 2D and 3D image data sets from conventional and non-conventional image sources. Core activities of the CVL have included the analysis of 2D and 3D medical image data; modelling, visualization and training of minimally invasive surgery; 3-D vision and robotics; as well as knowledge based interpretation of remote sensing imagery. The CVL initiated and is leading house of a National Centre of Competence in Research on “Computer Aided and Image Guided Medical Interventions (NCCR Co-Me).”