Dr. Fabian Walter

Between 2015 and 2021, Fabian Walter was an SNF Assistant Professor at VAW. He led the group of glacier seismology and in April 2021 moved to a senior researcher position at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL.

Fabian Walter was born in Germany and moved to the US to pursue a university degree in physics. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Brigham Young University, Utah, and a Master of Science from the University of Colorado. During his graduate studies in Colorado, Fabian made first contacts with the field of glaciology and wrote a master thesis on Columbia Glacier, Alaska, under the supervision of Prof. Tad Pfeffer. For his doctoral studies, he moved to VAW working on microseismic records from Gornergletscher (Canton Valais), in the context of glacier outburst floods under the supervisions of Prof. Martin Funk and Dr. Nicolas Deichmann. Since then, Fabian has performed various glacier seismological studies, including work in polar regions during postdoctoral appointments in California (USA), Grenoble (France) and at ETH Zürich. During his work as an assistant professor at ETH Zürich, he furthermore focused on Alpine mass movements and gravitational instabilities exploring the use of machine learning for realtime detection and autonomous drones.

Fabian Walter works on geophysical problems both at the fundamental process-related level as well as in applied contexts of natural hazards. His research has taken him to many icy places in the European Alps, Alaska, Greenland and Svalbard.