Prof. Stefan Wiemer was appointed as the director of the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) in 2013 and holds the chair of Seismology at the Department of Earth Science at ETH Zurich. He obtained a diploma in geophysics from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany in 1992 and a PhD in Geophysics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (US) in 1997. In the same year, he won a research fellowship from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and moved to the Japan Meteorological Agency in Tsukuba for a postdoc position. Two years later, he relocated to ETH Zurich as a research associate. 

Stefan Wiemer’s research focuses on the effects of earthquakes and investigates which processes in the earth’s crust trigger earthquakes. His expertise and research interests include probabilistic seismic hazard and risk assessments, time-dependent processes, laboratory seismology, earthquake predictability, operational earthquake forecasting, earthquake early warning, and induced seismicity related to geothermal energy applications. He has published more than 200 articles in international peer-reviewed journals since 1994 and supervised 23 PhD students at ETH. He is also a lecturer at the University of Bern. 

In his area of expertise, Stefan Wiemer holds several positions of trust. He has been a member of the ERC Consolidator and Advanced Grants Evaluation Panel since 2015. In 2017, Stefan Wiemer became part of the International Expert Panel on Mining Effects appointed by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (kemprogramma.nl) and still serves in this position. He has also been a member of the ETH Tenure Committee since then. Furthermore, since 2021, Stefan Wiemer has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Research Center of Geosciences (GFZ), a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), and the president of the Swiss Geophysical Commission. 

Stefan Wiemer is deeply involved in earthquake-related topics in Switzerland. In 2004 and 2015, he was responsible for the publication of the Swiss national earthquake hazard model. Currently, Stefan Wiemer leads the project on a first open-access national earthquake risk model. 

Stefan Wiemer has initiated or participated in many large-scale national and international projects. He is currently the coordinator of the EU funded project RISE on dynamic earthquake risk assessments, the coordinator of the EU COFUND project DEEP on de-risking enhanced geothermal projects, and the deputy director of the Bedretto Underground Laboratory for Geosciences and Geoenergies. Further, Stefan Wiemer is one of four Principal Investigators of the ERC Synergy grant project FEAR, focused on conducting fault activation and earthquake rupture experiments in the BedrettoLab.

Stefan Wiemer is a citizen of Switzerland and Germany and the father of two children. He lives with his family in Zurich Höngg.