New Professor of Translational Psychiatry
Professor Philipp Sterzer has been appointed the new Professor of Translational Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel; he will work at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel (UPK). He conducts research in the field of cognitive neuroscience and deals with mental disorders, such as schizophrenia.
14 January 2022
Shortly before Christmas 2021, the University Council passed a circular resolution to appoint Professor Philipp Sterzer as Professor of Translational Psychiatry at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel (UPK). He will take up the professorship on 1 May 2022.
Philipp Sterzer, born in 1970, studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was a Munich-Harvard Medical Education Alliance fellow at Harvard Medical School, Boston (US). He earned his doctorate in Munich, received his specialist qualification in neurology in 2007 and further specialist qualifications in psychiatry and psychotherapy in 2010. In 2008, he completed his habilitation in experimental psychiatry at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
His research focuses on functional brain imaging, computational modeling of psychoses and data-driven classification of mental disorders. Another major concern of his is the advancement of talented young scientists.
Synergies between clinical work and research
Sterzer’s research career has included posts at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at University College London, and the Charité in Berlin. In 2011, he was appointed professor of psychiatry with a focus on computational neuroscience at the Charité. Sterzer has served as attending physician and head of the acute psychiatry unit in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Charité since 2019, and as deputy medical director there since 2020.
With the new appointment, the Professorship of Neuropsychiatry will be renamed the Professorship of Translational Psychiatry. The aim of translational psychiatry is to integrate research findings into daily clinical practice and patient care, and, conversely, to include questions from practice in research. The position therefore encompasses both a clinical component and a teaching and research component.
Further information
Noëmi Kern, University of Basel, Communications, phone: +41 61 207 24 25, email: noemi.kern@unibas.ch
