Müller, Ralph, Prof.

Institute for Biomechanics Department of Health Sciences and Technology

 

Areas of Interest:

• Medical Engineering

Biography
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Ralph Müller is an Associate Professor of Biomechanics at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering and the Director of the Center for Bioengineering Research and Education at ETH Zürich.

Born on May 5, 1964, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he studied electrical engineering at the ETH in Zürich, where he also received his Ph.D. in 1994. Subsequently, he served as a project manager for the micro-computed tomography project of the European Union Concerted Action BIOMED1. In 1996, he moved to Boston, where before his return to Switzerland he served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the Associate Director of the Orthopedic Biomechanics Laboratory. Between 2000 and 2006, he was an SNF Professor of Bioengineering at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zürich.

The research he has completed and is currently pursuing employs state-of-the-art biomechanical testing and simulation techniques as well as novel bioimaging and visualization strategies for biological tissues. He is especially interested in image-guided failure assessment of porous microstructures and has developed different techniques to nondestructively monitor failure initiation and propagation as well as damage accumulation in three-dimensional porous matrices and tissue engineered constructs. Today, these methods are successfully employed for the quantitative assessment of structure function relationships in tissue healing, growth and adaptation. His approaches are now often used for precise phenotypic characterization of tissue response in mammalian genetics, gene therapy and mechanobiology.

He is an author of over 500 refereed publications in international scientific journals and conferences. He has received a number of awards, including the Inaugural John Haddad Young Investigator Award (1998) from the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) and Advances in Mineral Metabolism (AIMM) as well as the Promising Young Scientist Award (1999) from the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB). In 2004, he was named Young Leader by the American-Swiss Foundation. He is also active as an organizer of international symposia and working groups as well as a reviewer for scientific journals and funding agencies.