Born in Solothurn (Switzerland), he studied systematics and ecological biology at ETH in Zurich. After a M.Sc. in limnology, he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Hannes Flühler and Dr. Andreas Fischlin at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology of ETH, dealing with the impacts of climatic change on mountain forests in the Alps. His dissertation was awarded with the medal of ETH in 1994. From 1994 to 1998, he worked on the regionalimpacts of climatic change at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. In 1998/99, he did research on the ecology of Rocky Mountain forests at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in Boulder (Colorado, USA).
His main research interests are in the long-term dynamics of forest ecosystems under environmental change, particularly successional dynamics in mountain forests and changes in the disturbance regimes (e.g. windthrow, bark beetles, wildfires).
