Short Bio:
Michael Josef Zehetbauer was born 1951 in Vienna, Austria, and studied Physics with the University of Vienna. While holding a position as scientific assistant he received his PhD degree concerning the “Effects of Short Range Order to the Strength of Alloys”. As a young assistant professor he focused his research on the field of plasticity of materials, and was awarded the habilitation in 1992 for Solid State Physics. Five years later within the Institute of Materials Physics of University of Vienna, he has been appointed to an Assoc. Univ. Professor. In 2007 he became the head of a new research group named “Physics of Nanostructured Materials” with more than 40 members, and directed it till his retirement in 2016.
The scientific oeuvre of Prof.Michael Zehetbauer is mainly based on fundamental works in the plasticity of metals and of polymers. Besides new findings raising the importance of dislocation kinetics for the strength of semicrystalline polymers, he has established the stages IV and V of plastic deformation, and a physical model called “Zehetbauer’s model” simulating the strengthening in solids in terms of statistical interactions of screw and edge dislocations, and deformation-induced vacancies. His high expertise in large plastic deformation made him a pioneer of the famous field of “Severe Plastic Deformation” (SPD), with emphasis on the role of hydrostatic pressure for both reaching high deformation strains as well as high densities of defects, especially vacancies. Since recently, M. Zehetbauer has been showing the high potential of SPD induced defects for increasing the efficiency of functional materials such as nanostructured thermoelectrics, hydrogen storage materials, biodegradable implant materials, and soft ferromagnetic materials.
So far Michael Zehetbauer published about 300 mostly peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals, which have been currently cited more than 9000x corresponding to an h-factor h=55 (Google Scholar). He organized 10 international conferences including the publication of related proceedings, and also edited the book “Bulk Nanostructured Materials” with 30 review articles of world-reputed authors. He held Visiting Professorships at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, and at the Universities Strasbourg and Metz, France. He was assigned several international prices from Poland, Russia and Germany, among them the highly renowned Tammann Commemorative Medal of the German Materials Society, and above all the UNESCO Medal For Contributions To The Development Of Nanoscience And Nanotechnologies. He has been a founding member of the International NanoSPD Steering Committee, and since 2005 he is a member of the Board of the European Materials Research Society.
Michael Zehetbauer is known for his high enthusiasm for materials physics which is also reflected by his teaching activities including numerous oral and lab courses on materials physics. This way - during his academic life - he attracted more than 40 students so far who finished PhD and MSc works under his supervision.
It can be concluded that Michael Zehetbauer is an outstanding scientist and enthusiastic representant of modern Materials Science, and a person highly estimated equally by his students and by the colleagues in home country and abroad.
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