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K. Alex Müller received his Ph.D. in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1958. After spending five years at the Battelle Institute in Geneva as a project manager, he joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 1963, where he continued to work in solid-state physics. The University of Zurich appointed him lecturer in 1962, titular professor in 1970, and professor in 1987. He is the author of more than 400 technical publications. Professor Müller was manager of the physics department at ZRL from 1973 to 1992 and an IBM Fellow. From 1992 – 1998, he continued his relationship with IBM Research as an IBM Fellow Emeritus. Since then, he has devoted his time fully to basic research in structural phase transitions, critical and multicritical phenomena, as well as the behavior of ferroelectrica at low temperatures. He is working to understand the fundamental processes that lead to high-temperature superconductivity. For this work, he collaborates with various groups of experimentalists both in Switzerland and abroad. He has also become increasingly interested in the philosophical questions related to the present and future.
For the discovery of the cuprates in the field of high-temperature superconductors, he and J. Georg Bednorz received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987, and many other honors.
He has received honorary degrees of Doctor of Science from seventeen universities. He is an honorary member of various organizations, including the Swiss Physical Society, the Zurich Physical Society and the Academy of Ceramics. He is a foreign associate member of the Academy of Sciences of the United States, a fellow of the American Physical Society, foreign associate member of the Russian, Slovenian, Polish and Sachsen academies of science.
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