Renato Zenobi is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Organic Chemistry Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. He received a M.S. degree from the ETH Zurich in 1986, and a Ph.D. at Stanford University in the USA in 1990. After postdoctoral appointments at the University of Pittsburgh (1990 - 1991) and at the University of Michigan (1991) he returned to Switzerland in 1992 as a Werner Fellow at the EPFL, Lausanne, where he established his own research group. Assistant professor at the ETH in 1995, associate professor in 1997, and full professor in 2000.  Chairman of the Organic Chemistry Laboratory in 2002-2003 and 2011-2012, served as the president of ETH’s university assembly from 2006 – 2008, and of the lecturer’s conference at ETH Zurich 2006 - 2010. Zenobi was a visiting professor at the Barnett Institute (Boston) in 2004/2005, and at the Institut Curie (Paris) in 2010.  In 2010 he was appointed Associate Editor of Analytical Chemistry (American Chemical Society). He has chaired the 2014 International Mass Spectrometry Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

Zenobi’s research areas include laser-based analytical chemistry, electrospray and laser-assisted mass spectrometry, ambient mass spectrometry, and near-field optical microscopy and spectroscopy. He has made important contributions to the understanding of the ion formation mechanism in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry, and to ambient ionization methods. He is well known for the development of analytical tools for the nanoscale, in particular TERS (tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy), a spectroscopic methodology with ≈ 10 nm spatial resolution.