Walter Vetter is an Honorary Professor at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences. He received a Diploma in Chemistry from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1990 and the Doctor grade from the University of Hohenheim, Germany in 1993. A stipend grant from the Royal Norwegian Research Council enabled him to conduct research at the Norwegian Institute of Air Research (1991-1992). From 1993-2002 he was group leader at the Institute of Nutrition at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena (Germany). In 1998 he defended his habilitation (2nd doctoral thesis) in food chemistry. Since 2002 he has held the chair of food chemistry at the University of Hohenheim (Germany). In 2017, he was appointed as the Director of the Institute of Food Chemistry at his university. His research areas are food, environmental and analytical chemistry and topics include research on halogenated natural products and POPs, lipid analysis, countercurrent chromatography, enantiomer separation and stable isotope analysis. Walter is a founding member and vice-president of the Society of Nutrition and Food Science (snfs.org), and deputy editor-of-chief of NFS Journal. In 2016 he received the Edward Chou Award (Chicago, IL) and in 2018 the Herbert J. Dutton Award (Minneapolis, MN).

Walter Vetter started to collaborate with Caroline Gaus and Jochen Mueller in 2000. Since then they have shared research projects mainly on halogenated natural products. Several researchers from UQ were in Hohenheim and vice versa.