Obituary Dr. Martin Badertscher

Martin was born in St.Gallen in 1956 where he did both his primary and secondary school as well as his vocational training as a Lab Technician. In 1976, Martin started his Chemistry studies at the Kantonalen Technikum Winterthur and continued these studies in 1981 at the ETH Zürich.

In 1984 Martin started his PhD studies with Prof. Dr. W. Simon at the Laboratory for Organic Chemistry at the ETH Zürich. His Dissertation title was “Ein Modell zur Beschreibung von Komplexen einiger Kationen mit neutralen Liganden. His Postdoc studies took him to the United States to the lab of Prof. Dr. M. E. Munk at the Arizona State University in 1988. He worked on the computer-aided methods for the structural elucidation with spectroscopic methods.

After his stint in the US, Martin started his long career at the ETH Zürich. He started as Scientific Assistant with his “Doktorvater” Prof. Simon, with whom he had several publications dealing with a variety of topics.

In 1993 Martin became the head of the Radiochemistry group, which he continued until its closure in 2020. Martin was responsible for the education of countless students with the use of radioactive materials, as well as the safety office for the Organic Chemistry Laboratory (LOC). Martin also took on a plethora of other responsibilities, including serving as the IT officer for the LOC, organizing various lab courses, being the contact person for problems in statistical data analysis and chemometrics, and lecturing in radiochemistry, chemometrics, and structure elucidation, to name just a few.

It is especially in that capacity with close contact to students, where Martin was remarkable. His passion for teaching and his strives to enable all students in excelling in what they do is the hallmark of his character. He spent many hours with individual students to help them. Martin always organsied a barbeque after the spring semester to thank all involved in the lab course, students and teaching assistants.

Martin was a lovely, dedicated, quiet person who would never claim the honour for himself. He was in love with science and teaching and ETH was his world. Martin is survived by his brother and sister who said goodbye to him in a closed ceremony in St.Gallen.