Kuster, Niels

President of the Board

Professor Niels Kuster received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). Between 1993 and 1999, he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of ETHZ and, in 2001, he was awarded Titular Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETHZ.  Since 1999, he has served as the founding Director of the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies in Society (IT’IS), Switzerland.  

During his career, he has held invited professorships at the Electromagnetics Laboratory of Motorola, Inc, Florida, and at the Metropolitan University in Tokyo, Japan in 1998. In 2010, he initiated the sister institute IT'IS USA, a non-profit research unit incorporated in Maryland, USA.

Niels Kuster founded the following spin-off companies with the objective to turn the most promising research results into high quality products, to create jobs and to offer the involved researchers the opportunity to further refine and commercially exploit their results:

• Schmid & Partner Engineering AG in 1994, together with his ETHZ research team colleagues
• MaxWave AG in 1998, with his colleagues Dr. Georg Klaus and Dr. Roland Walthert
• NF Technology Holding AG in 2001, with the new management of SPEAG
• ZMT Zurich MedTech AG (ZMT) in 2006, with the IT'IS team involved in medical sciences

His primary research interests are in the safe and beneficial applications of electromagnetic (EM) fields in health and information technologies. He is particularly interested in 1) measurement technology; 2) computational electrodynamics for the evaluation of close near-fields in complex environments (e.g., handheld or body-mounted transceivers, residential/work environments, etc.); 3) safe and reliable wireless communication links within the body or between implanted devices and exterior equipment for biometric applications; 4) development of exposure setups and quality control for bioexperiments to evaluate interaction mechanisms, therapeutic effects, and potential health risks; 5) exposure assessments; 6) EM safety of medical devices; 7) medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications of EM, in particular EM cancer treatment modalities; and 8) virtual patient applications. He is currently building a new research team in computational life science in biology.

Niels has published about 700 publications in books, journals, and conference proceedings on measurement techniques, computational electromagnetics, dosimetry, exposure assessments, and bioexperiments. He is a member of several standardization bodies and acts as a consultant to government agencies around the globe on the safety of mobile communications. He was BEMS president in 2008–2009. He served on various editorial boards and is currently associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility.