Christian Köberl

Christian Koeberl is Director General of the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria, and full professor of geosciences (impact research and planetary geology) at the University of Vienna, where he is deputy head of the Department of Lithospheric Research. He is a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Koeberl studied chemistry, physics, and astronomy at the Technical University Vienna and the University of Vienna, and obtained a PhD at the University of Graz (Austria) in 1983. His “habilitation” (1990) was in geo- and cosmochemistry. After visiting appointments at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) and NASA in Houston and the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, USA, in the 1980s and 1990s, he was also a visiting professor at Dartmouth College (USA), Wits University (Johannesburg, South Africa), and Open University (UK).

Koeberl’s research deals mostly with terrestrial impact craters, especially geochemical, mineralogical, and petrographic studies, but also includes the early Earth, meteorites, and planetary geology. Koeberl has published over 460 peer-reviewed scientific papers and written or edited 18 books. He is associate editor of the journals “Meteoritics and Planetary Science” and Geochemical et Cosmochimica Acta”, was science editor of the “Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin”, and is currently science editor for books at the GSA. Asteroid 15963 is named in his honor “Koeberl”. Among other honors, he received the “Barringer Medal” for his impact research.