Werner Siegfried Weiglhofer was born in
Bruck an der Mur on 25 August 1962. He obtained his doctorate in technical sciences from
Graz University of Technology in 1986; his doctoral studies focused on scalar
Hertz potentials in anisotropic materials. Following his post-doctoral studies at
University of Adelaide on the basis of an Australian-European Fellowship, he joined the Department of Mathematics at
University of Glasgow as a research assistant in 1988, working on
magnetohydrodynamics. Becoming a lecturer at the department in 1991, he eventually was tenured as a professor in 2002. Weiglhofer's main research interests were magnetohydrodynamics and
electrodynamics of complex materials, such as
chiral and
bi-anisotropic media. His research career was marked with extensive collaborations with
Akhlesh Lakhtakia. During his research career, he authored or co-authored 135 research publications in peer-reviewed journals, as well as an undergraduate textbook on ordinary
differential equations. He has served on the editorial boards of the journals
AEU — International Journal of Electronics and Communications and
Electromagnetics, and was the recipient of multiple
URSI Young Scientists awards, as well as a research fellowship from
Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1997, he organized the Bianisotropics '97 conference in University of Glasgow. Weiglhofer had an avid interest in
mountaineering and
snowshoeing, and climbed to all of the
Munros in Scotland. From 1991 onwards, he has travelled extensively to
Romsdal for mountain climbing and published two guidebooks to its peaks. Having learnt
Norwegian language, he contributed to local newspapers on mountaineering-related topics. On 12 January 2003, he died in an avalanche at Bispen mountain in
Trollstigen, Norway. By the time of his death, he was co-editing the monograph
Introduction to Complex Mediums for Optics and Electromagnetics, which was released in the same year posthumously. A conference in honour of Weiglhofer, titled Weiglhofer Symposium on Electromagnetic Theory, was first held in July 2022 in
University of Edinburgh; it was organized by Akhlesh Lakhtakia and Weiglhofer's only doctoral student, Tom G. Mackay. ==Selected publications==