Walter Kob

Walter Kob was born on May 1, 1961 in Basel, Switzerland. In 1989 he received his PhD in theoretical Physics at the University of Basel. After a postdoc at the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, he became in 1994 an assistant professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Mainz in Germany. In 2000 he accepted a full professorship at the University of Montpellier, France. There he became the head of the Laboratoire des Verres and subsequently of the Laboratoire des Colloides, Verres, et Nanomateriaux.

The topics of his research are focused on the structural and dynamical properties of disordered systems, such as glasses, polymeric systems, granular materials. For his studies he mainly uses atomistic computer simulations, but in recent years he has also been involved in several experimental studies. These investigations have been documented in more than 200 research papers and one textbook on disordered materials, collecting more than 12000 citations. For this work Walter Kob has been honored by the Otto Schott Research Award, Prix Ivan Peyches of the French Academie des Sciences, Darshana and Arun Varshneya Frontiers of Glass Science Lecture, as well as a Senior Membership of the Institut Universitaire de France.