Prof. Renato Zenobi

Renato Zenobi

Renato Zenobi is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at ETH Zurich. He is also one of the founders and the current director of the center of excellence in analytical chemistry at the ETH Zurich.
Renato Zenobi was born in Zurich in 1961. He received a M.S. degree from the ETH Zurich in 1986, and a Ph.D. at Stanford University in the USA in 1990, followed by two postdoctoral appointments at the University of Pittsburgh (1990 - 1991) and at the University of Michigan (1991). Renato Zenobi returned to Switzerland in 1992 as a Werner Fellow at the EPFL, Lausanne, where he established his own research group. He became assistant professor at the ETH in 1995, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, and to full professor in 2000. He was chairman of the Organic Chemistry Laboratory in 2002-2003. He was a visiting professor at the Barnett Institute (Boston) in 2004-2005.

Zenobi's research areas include laser-based analytical chemistry, electrospray and laser-assisted mass spectrometry, laser-surface interactions, and near-field optical microscopy and spectroscopy. He has made important contributions to the understanding of the ion formation mechanism in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry and to the development of analytical tools for the nanoscale.
He has co-authored over 160 research papers and 5 patents.
Renato Zenobi has received several awards for his scientific work, including the Thomas Hirschfeld Award (1989), an Andrew Mellon Fellowship (1990), the Ruzicka Prize (1993), the Heinrich Emanuel Merck-Prize (1998), and the Theophilus Redwood Lectureship (2005) from the Royal Society of Chemistry.