Shaping the Future: ETH Domain Conference 2025

About

Michael O. Hengartner has been President of the ETH Board since 2020. He served as President of the University of Zurich (UZH) from 2014 to 2020, and President of swissuniversities from 2016 to 2020. He has dual Swiss and Canadian citizenship and grew up in Quebec City where he studied biochemistry at the Université Laval. In 1994, Michael O. Hengartner was awarded his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol­ogy in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate H. Robert Horvitz. He then headed a research group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA. After that, he was appointed Professor at the Institute of Molecular Biology in 2001 and Dean of the Faculty of Science at UZH from 2009 to 2014. Michael O. Hengartner has an Executive MBA at IMD Lausanne and a number of awards for his research and teaching skills.

About

Joël Mesot has been President of ETH Zurich since 2019 and, in this role, bears legal and political responsibility for the university.  Under his leadership, ETH Zurich has intensified its policy-relevant research and deepened the dialogue with political actors both in Switzerland and internationally. Furthermore, Mesot launched various initiatives related to space, AI, cyber security and energy and initiated the establishment of an ETH Zurich Campus in Heilbronn, Germany.

Raised in Geneva, Joël Mesot studied physics at ETH Zurich and received his doctorate on high-temperate superconductors in 1992. He spent several years researching quantum materials in France (Institut Laue-Langevin), the US (Argonne National Laboratory), and at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), where he became head of the neutron scattering laboratory in 2004. In 2008, he was elected Director of the PSI and was promoted to Full Professor at ETH Zurich. During his leadership at the PSI the X-ray free-electron laser facility SwissFel was built, among other projects.

Joël Mesot is a member of national and international advisory boards, including the Foundation Board of the Swiss Innovation Park and the Governing Board CREATE (Singapore). For his scientific contributions, he received the IBM Prize of the Swiss Physical Society (SPG) in 1995 and the Latsis Prize of ETH Zurich in 2002.

About

Anna Fontcuberta i Morral studied Physics at the University of Barcelona, followed by a PhD in Materials Science at the Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France. Between 2001 and 2005, she conducted research as a postdoc and visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, and as a CNRS researcher in France. During this time, she was co-founder of the suc­cessful start-up Aonex Technologies, a company that developed lower cost substrates for LEDs and multi-junction solar cells. She received her Habilitation degree in Experimental Physics at the Technical University of Munich, Germany in 2009.

Since 2008, she has been working at EPFL, where she was promoted to Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 2014 before being promoted to Full Professor in September 2019. She has established her Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials as the world leader in sustainable nanotech­nologies. Between 2021 and 2024, she served as EPFL’s Associate Vice President for Centers and Platforms. In this latter role, she worked to build synergies across research disciplines boosting the reach of Centers (like EcoCloud, the Bernoulli Center and the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering) and she reinforced the possibilities for EPFL scientists and engineers access to state-of-the-art research facilities ( Research Computing Platform, Dubochet Center for Imaging, Center for Micronanofabriction to name a few). She joined the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2015 and, from 2020 to 2024, she served as chair of the SNSF’s specialized committee on international cooperation. In this role, she helped develop the international strategy and took part in a working group to design the recent changes to the SNSF’s bylaws and policies

Her work has been recognized through a number of distinctions. For instance, she was selected for a Marie Curie Excellence Grant in 2005, a European Research Council Starting Grant in 2009, an SNSF Back-up Schemes Consolidator Grant in 2015, and the Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics from the European Physical Society, also in 2015.

She became President of EPFL in January 2025.

About

About

Rolf Holderegger studied biology at the University of Zurich, completing his doctorate in 1997. He then worked for two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He also worked part-time as a secondary school teacher and as a nature conservation consultant. In 2001 he took up a position as deputy head of the Ecological Genetics section at the WSL, going on to head the Ecological Genetics and Evolution research unit from 2006. In 2009 he was appointed titular professor at the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences at ETH Zurich. Since 2011 he has headed the Biodiversity and Conservation Biology research unit at WSL. Rolf was a member of the WSL senior management from 2011 to 2023 and has been WSL Director since October 2024.

About

Tanja Zimmermann received her doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 2007. From 2001 to 2012, she worked closely with industry to establish the cellulose nanocomposites research area at Empa, and headed the Department of Applied Wood Materials from 2011 to 2017. In 2017, she became a member of the management team and head of the Functional Materials Department, leading around 200 employees. She has been Empa Director since June 2022.

About

Martin Ackermann studied biology at the University of Basel, where he received his PhD in 2002. He then worked for two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego. In 2004, he joined ETH Zurich as a senior scientist and was appointed Assistant Professor SNSF in 2006. In 2008, he became a tenured professor at ETH Zurich in a joint appointment with Eawag, first as Associate Professor and, in 2015, as Full Professor of Microbial Systems Ecology. In January 2023, Martin took on the role of Director of Eawag. At the same time, he became Professor of Microbial Systems Ecology at EPFL. Alongside his duties as Director, he continues to co-lead his research group part-time.