In 2006, Bert Müller has been appointed as the first Thomas Straumann Chair for Materials Science in Medicine at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the founding director of the Biomaterials Science Center – an integral part of the oldest medical faculty in Switzerland. Since 2001 he has been independently teaching at the physics department of ETH Zurich. In addition, Bert Müller has been one of the maximal one hundred research councillors of the Swiss National Science Foundation since 2019. In 1989, he received his Master degree in physics from the Dresden University of Technology, Germany. He earned a doctoral degree in experimental physics from the University of Hannover, Germany, in 1994. The research output is characterized by almost 400 journal papers and book chapters. Bert Müller was the main supervisor of 35 doctoral thesis projects. His current research interests include high-resolution hard X-ray imaging and physics-based approaches to challenges in medicine and dentistry. For the fourth time, he is the chair of the well-established conference “Developments in X-ray Tomography”. Bert Müller has been named the 2022 recipient of the SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award in recognition of his distinguished contributions to 2D and 3D imaging for the challenges of the 21st century including cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Most recently, he has developed to an entrepreneur: The spin-off companies Bottmedical, Acthera Therapeutics and Bottneuro were founded in 2019 and 2021.

I am currently Dean of Postgraduate Education and Research Leader in Life Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London, as well as Honorary Professor in Palaeobiology in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment at University College London. My main research interests are in vertebrate evolution and development, especially using 3D morphometric methods to incorporate data from embryos to fossils to test genetic and developmental hypotheses of modularity and morphological diversity and reconstruct macroevolutionary patterns through deep time. I have previously focused on skull evolution in carnivorans and the marsupial-placental dichotomy, but in recent years, I have expanded across the diversity of systems, with an ERC-funded project on modularity and morphological diversification across tetrapods, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on pelagic fish skull evolution, a recently-completed Leverhulme Trust-funded project on cat postcranial mechanics and evolutionary modularity, and multiple projects focused on whale skull evolution and development and multivariate methods development. With collaborators and lab members, we are currently extending this work to incorporate comparative genomic and transcriptomic data, as well as applying our morphometric innovations to comparative ontogenetic morphology. I am also currently working on the relationships and paleobiogeography of Mesozoic and early Cenozoic mammals, particularly focusing on Gondwanan eutherians, with a recently-completed Leverhulme Trust-funded project uniting genomics and fossils to elucidate early placental evolution. As part of this work, I was also involved in a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the evolution of latitudinal biodiversity gradients in Cretaceous vertebrates. I currently conduct fieldwork in the Cretaceous and Palaeogene of India and Argentina, but have previously been involved in fieldwork in Svalbard, Peru, Chile, Madagascar, and the United States. I have also conducted palaeoecological research on Triassic amniotes and Eocene whales using dental microwear and stable isotopes.