Gruber, Nicolas

Biography

Nicolas Gruber has been Full Professor of Environmental Physics at the Department of Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich since July 2006. Dr. Gruber was born in Peru in 1968, and moved to Switzerland at the age of 6. After his Matura in 1989, he was among the first students to enter the new Environmental Sciences degree program at ETH Zurich. As part of his undergraduate studies, he spent one year at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, where he worked with the late Charles D. Keeling, sparking his interests in the human perturbation of the global carbon cycle. After earning his diploma degree in 1993, Dr. Gruber went to the University of Bern for his Ph.D. studies, which he completed in 1997. He then worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. In 2000, he joined the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, first as an assistant professor, and from 2005 until 2007 as a tenured associate professor. In 2006, he was appointed as a full professor at ETH Zurich.

Research Interest

Dr. Gruber's research interests are the study of biogeochemical cycles on regional to global scales and on timescales from months to millennia, with a particular focus on the interaction of these cycles with Earth's climate system. His goal is to better understand the physical, chemical and biological processes that control these cycles and to be able to make predictions for the future, especially with regard to the potential feedbacks between the global carbon cycle and a changing climate. His primary research tools are the interpretation and analysis of observational data coupled with the use of models ranging in complexity from simple box models to general circulation models.