Niels Kuster
Founder & Director of IT'IS Foundation
Professor of ETH Zurich
Professor Niels Kuster received his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ).
He joined the academic staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at ETHZ as an Assistant Professor in 1998 and was appointed Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETHZ in 2001. Prof. Kuster has also served as the founding Director of the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies in Society (IT’IS), Switzerland since 2001 and as President of IT’IS USA since its inception in 2010.
During his career he has held invited professorships at the Electromagnetics Laboratory of Motorola, Inc, Florida and at the Metropolitan University in Tokyo, Japan in 1998.
Prof. Kuster founded several spin-off companies with the objectives of converting the most promising research results into high-quality commercial technologies, products and services; creating jobs; and providing researchers an innovative and productive research platform to develop and commercially exploit their knowledge:
- Schmid & Partner Engineering AG in 1994 together with his ETHZ research colleagues
- MaxWave AG in 1998 with his colleagues Dr. Georg Klaus and Dr. Roland Walthert
- NFT Holding AG in 2002 with the new management of SPEAG
- Zurich MedTech AG (ZMT) in 2006 with the IT'IS team involved in medical sciences
In 2011, Prof. Kuster launched a new research initiative, IT’IS for Health, integrating his primary research interests in EM technologies, computational life sciences and personalized medicine. More specifically, his research focuses on the development of 1) measurement technologies; 2) computational physics; 3) in silico tissue models; 4) physiological human models, 5) medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications, particularly novel cancer treatment modalities; 6) electrodynamics for the optimization of devices operating in highly complex environments; 7) safe and reliable wireless communication links within the body or between implanted devices and external equipment for biometric applications; and 8) exposure setups and quality control procedures for bioexperiments to evaluate interaction mechanisms, therapeutic effects and potential health risks.
Niels has published over 700 publications (books, journals and proceedings) on measurement techniques, computational electromagnetics, dosimetry, exposure assessments and bioexperiments. He is a member of several standardization bodies and serves as a consultant on the safety of mobile communications for government agencies around the globe. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Society, a delegate of the Swiss Academy of Science, and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility. He served as the President of the Biolectromagnetics Society from 2008-2009 and as a member of various editorial boards. In 2012, he received the prestigious d'Arsonval Award, the highest scientific honor of the Bioelectromagnetics Society. In addition, he currently serves on the boards of IMRICOR Inc. and TheraBionic LLC.