Spring 2010 (PDF) - Virginia Tech

GRADUATE
COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER
Stephan Bieri
Dr. Stephan Bieri serves as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Virginia Bioinformatics
Institute. Earlier this year he was elected as Chairman of the University Council of the University of
Bayreuth in Germany.
Following his graduation in 1968 from the University of Zürich with a doctorate in economics, he
accepted a research fellowship at Kent University in Canterbury, United Kingdom. In the seventies, he
returned to the University of Zürich as a lecturer teaching regional and industrial economics and was
also a member of the Swiss Science Council from 1976 to 1992.
In the eighties, Dr. Bieri held management positions in the private sector and served as a board
member for various Swiss companies. He was the CEO of a large integrated Swiss utility company and
later became president of a large general contractor. In 1991 he was the president of the Swiss federal
board for regional economic development and was chairman of an international group of experts that
evaluated priority research programs for the federal government.
In 1995 he was elected chief executive officer and vice president of the board for the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zürich. This educational system consists of two universities and four large
research institutes. Dr. Bieri led a broad internal reorganization that gave more autonomy to the six
institutions and enabled major investments in modern scientific infrastructure. He held this position until
his semi-retirement in 2004. That year he returned to the private sector and, along with his daughter,
established a consulting firm focused on scientific evaluation and intellectual property.
Dr. Bieri has published extensively on the topics of fiscal federalism, science policy, and planning
theory. He is a member of the Evaluation Committee of the German Science Council.
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