Michael Weinold is a doctoral researcher in the Group for Technology Assessment at Paul Scherrer Institute and the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zürich. He is supervised by Prof. Russell McKenna of ETH Zurich and Prof. Guillaume Majeau-Bettez of Polytechnique Montréal .
Research Topic
His research interests include life-cycle assessment for sustainable aviation and methodological improvements for hybrizing life-cycle inventory. His research is undertaken as part of the WISER Innosuisse flagship, an interdisciplinary project funded by Swiss Innovation Agency. It is aimed at providing a web of interoperable digital services for knowledge on decarbonisation pathways.
Teaching Responsibilities
Michael Weinold is currently a guest lecturer and head teaching assistant in the aviation lectures of Doz. Dr. Peter Wild at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zürich:
- Basics of Air Transport ("Aviation I")
- Sustainability and Management of Air Transport ("Aviation II")
He teaches the lecture unit "Introduction to Sustainable Aviation", which provides a comprehensive overview of current trends in the air transport sector - and many of the possible pathways to reducing aviation carbon emissions.
Academic Supervision
The following student projects have been supervised by Michael Weinold:
March 2023 - September 2023:
Philipp Rohrer
"Disaggregating Efficiency Improvements in Air Transportation"
(Master's Thesis, ETH Zurich, Department for Mechanical and Process Engineering)
December 2023 - January 2024:
Siddhant Sahu
"Parametric Performance Data Generation of Future Aircraft for Life-Cycle Assessment"
(Software Development Internship, University of Zurich, Department of Computer Science)
February 2024 - July 2024:
Ben Arendt and
Dominik Dedic
"Building a Global Map of the Air Transport Network"
(Student Project, ETH Zurich, Department for Mechanical and Process Engineering)
Scientific Software Development
Michael Weinold is part of the development and steering team behind the Brightway open-source software framework for life-cycle assessment. Since 2022, he has been in charge of the technical documentation of the entire software framework. In 2024, his work was recognized by PyData as an outstanding example of software documentation. He is an expert in the use of Web Assembly for documentation and scientific computing.
Education and Previous Activities
Michael obtained his Master's degree in Physics from ETH Zurich in 2021. As part of his degree, he spent one year as a visiting researcher at the C-EENRG research center at the University of Cambridge. He holds an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from Vienna University of Technology, Austria.
Before joining the Technology Assessment group, he worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer in the financial industry. He is currently a board member of the Zurich Academic Aviation Association and an active scholarship holder of the Swiss Study Foundation.