Niels Kuster

During his post-doctoral studies at IFH in 1992, Prof. Kuster also worked at the Electromagnetics Laboratory of Motorola Inc in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1993, Kuster was then appointed assistant professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) at the ETH Zurich. Kuster co-founded Schmid and Partners Engineering AG (SPEAG) in December 1994 as a spin-off company of the ETH-Zurich, together with Thomas Schmid, Kurt Schmid, Martin Schmid, Oliver Egger, and Klaus Meier, with the main objective to further develop and commercialize the Dosimetric Assessment SYstem (DASY), the first electromagnetic near-field scanner optimized for testing the compliance of mobile communications devices with safety limits. In 1998, he was a visiting professor and lecturer at the Tokyo Metropolitan University in Japan. In 1999, he founded the Swiss non-profit Foundation for Research on Information Technology in Society (IT'IS) and relocated his research group there to be able to react more flexibly to research problems concerning human exposure to electromagnetic radiation. Kuster founded ZMT Zurich MedTech AG (ZMT) in 2006 as a spin-off company of the ETH-Zurich and the IT'IS Foundation. Between 2000 and 2021, he has been able to acquire more than CHF 100 million in 3rd-party funding. He has been an adjunct professor at the ETH Zurich since 2001 and headed the BioElectromagnetics research group of the ETH's Laboratory for Integrated Systems. His main achievements are in the areas of measurement and simulation methods in the electromagnetic near field, safety aspects of wireless communication and magnetic resonance imaging, virtual human and animal models for investigations of anatomy-dependent interactions and optimization of therapies via computer simulation (e.g., in silico clinical trials and neurostimulation).

Kuster grew up in Olten, in the Swiss Canton of Solothurn, where he attended elementary and middle school. After graduating from Gymnasium with the "Matura Type C" (concentration in mathematics and physical sciences) diploma, he studied at the ETH Zurich and graduated in 1984 with a degree in electrical engineering. Starting in 1985, he pursued doctoral work in the Laboratory for Field Theory and Microwave Technology (IFH) at the ETH Zurich under the direction of Heinrich Baggenstos, during which time he was a teaching and research assistant. He defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled "Dosimetric assessment of EM sources near biological bodies by computer simulations", in 1992.

Niels Kuster (born June 19, 1957, in Olten, Switzerland) is a Swiss electrical engineer and Professor. The focus of his research is on the electromagnetic near field, basics for assessing/using the interaction of electromagnetic fields with organisms, and physiological simulations as part of biophysics.