Gerhard Schmitt

Gerhard Schmitt is Professor Emeritus for Information Architecture at ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He is the Founding Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore and Lead Principal Investigator of the Cooling Singapore project. Since 2005, he developed Information Architecture on the urban and the territorial scale at ETH Zürich and in Asia. His research focuses on urban climate design, regenerative and responsive cities, big data informed urban design, urban metabolism, simulation and visualization. He and his team created and taught the first Massive Open Online Course Series on Future Cities, Liveable Cities, Smart Cities and Responsive Cities with more than 170’000 registrations.
From 2008-2017 he served as Senior Vice President ETH Global. From 1998-2008 he was Vice President for Planning and Logistics and Member of the Board of ETH Zürich, developing ETH’s strategy and planning in cooperation with the 16 scientific departments. From 1984 to 1988 he conducted Computer Aided architectural Design research and teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined ETH Zürich as Professor in 1988.
Gerhard Schmitt holds a Dipl.-Ing. and a Dr.-Ing. degree from the Technical University of Munich and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. He was Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Visiting Professor and later Visiting Committee Chair at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Dean of Architecture at ETH Zürich. He initiated the virtual campus ETH World in 2000 and in 2003 the sustainable ETH Science City Campus in Zürich. For this work, he received the 2010 European Culture of Science award.