Schmidt, Max W., Prof.

Max Schmidt has been a tenure track Assistent Professor (ETH/Universität Zürich) at the Institute for Mineralogy and Petrology of the ETH Zürich since August, 2001.

Max Schmidt was born in 1964 in Innsbruck, Austria. His undergraduate studies were at Kiel, Germany, his Masters in Geology (1988) and his Ph.D. (1992) in Experimental Petrology at ETH Zürich. During his PhD, he obtained an ETH scholarship for 6 months at Arizona State University. Afterwards, a SNF-fellowship allowed for a year of Post-Doc at Clermont-Ferrand, France. In 1994 he started a tenure track research position at Bayreuth, Germany, where he was in charge of the large volume high-pressure laboratories. In 1996, he obtained a (permanent) CNRS research position at Clermont-Ferrand where he habilitated (1999) and was awarded the "médaille de bronze" (2000). Sabbatical at RSES at the Australian National University in 2000/2001.

His "raison d'etre" in science is to apply innovative experimental methods to any interesting problem that is either relevant to the geological Earth or of interest in Materials Science. In this concept, field work has a significant role in that Nature is used for inspiration and suggestions for experimental projects.

Most of his research concerns high-pressure experiments, which are used to obtain thermodynamic and crystallographic data, to constrain phase equilibria and element partitionings in order to understand related metamorphic and magmatic processes.

Associated Research Labs:

• Solid Media High Pressure Laboratory

Publications:

• List of Papers
• List of Abstracts