Walter Steurer studied chemistry at the University of Vienna, Austria. After finishing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Hans Nowotny, he moved, in 1980, to the University of Munich, Germany, where he worked as a research assistant and lecturer. In 1987 he concluded his habilitation thesis in the field of crystallography and mineralogy. For a short period, from 1992 until 1993, he was Professor of Crystallography at the University of Hanover, Germany. Since fall 1993, he has been Full Professor of crystallography at the ETH and University of Zurich, Switzerland, until his retirement in 2016.
Julia Dshemuchadse studied physics at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and obtained her PhD in Materials Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2013 for her thesis on the structure of complex intermetallics under the supervision of Prof. Walter Steurer. She studied the statistics of complex intermetallics during a subsequent two-year postdoc with Prof. Steurer. In 2015, she was awarded the "Max-von-Laue-Preis" of the German Crystallographic Society (DGK). Since 2015, she is studying the self-assembly of complex phases with Prof. Sharon Glotzer at the University of Michigan, USA, funded by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation.