Many of my major discoveries have come from experiments that were not aimed at finding/studying that discovery; rather they were serendipitous by-products of otherwise unrelated experiments (…) I learnt that your mind always needs to be prepared for the unexpected.
Walter Herzog left his home country of Switzerland at 23 to study something that did not exist at home, and that would forever change the course of his life and career. Dr. Herzog did his undergraduate training at the ETH in Zurich, received his doctoral degree from the University of Iowa in Biomechanics and completed postdoctoral training in Calgary in 1987. His desire to know how things work fundamentally led to where he is today: a self-proclaimed accidental scientist and a world-renowned pioneer in biomechanics and muscle-contraction study.
Dr. Herzog is a Professor of Biomechanics in Kinesiology, Medicine, Engineering, and Veterinary Medicine, holds the Canada Research Chair for Cellular/Molecular Biomechanics, and is appointed Killam Memorial Chair for Inter-Disciplinary Research at the University of Calgary. He is the recipient of career awards from the American, Canadian, and International Societies of Biomechanics, and was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada in 2013.
(Photo David Brown, University of Calgary)