New professors at the University of Basel

Professor Roland Bingisser

The University Council appointed Professor Roland Bingisser to the newly established structural clinical professorship in emergency medicine to begin on 1 June 2020. Bingisser has been a professor in the Faculty of Medicine since 2007 and has worked as the head of department at the Emergency Center of University Hospital Basel since 2004. Since taking on the role of head of department at the Emergency Center, he has fostered clinical emergency medicine and interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration within the university hospital.

Born in Winterthur in 1961, Bingisser obtained his doctorate in 1991 following his medical studies at the University of Zurich, after which he specialized in internal medicine, pneumology and his main focus of emergency medicine. He then worked as a resident, attending and senior physician at University Hospital Zurich, the University of Western Australia, Perth, Kantonsspital St. Gallen and University Hospital Basel.

In his academic work, Bingisser’s research includes risk factors in relation to the outcome of emergency treatment, the development and validation of triage and disposition instruments, improvements in monitoring and the use of modern information technology to support clinical decisions. He attaches particular importance to improving communication with emergency patients.

Professor Petr Broz

Professor Petr Broz, professor for immunology in the Faculty of Medicine, works as an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Lausanne, where he has been conducting research in the field of innate immunity and cell death since 2017. He will take up his post in Basel on 1 January 2021. 

Broz was born in 1977 in Prague (Czech Republic) and grew up in Rheinfelden (Aargau). Following his studies in microbiology, he obtained a doctorate in the structure of bacterial type 3 secretion systems at the University of Basel’s Biozentrum in 2006. Following his research on immunology at CSL Behring AG, Bern, he moved to Stanford University (US) for four years in 2008 with a long-term scholarship from the Human Frontier Science Program, and returned to Basel in 2013 as an SNSF assistant professor, a position he held until 2017.

Broz is a specialist in the field of bacteria host cell interactions. He researches the defense strategies of the innate immune system, particularly the role of a cellular signal complex, the inflammasome, in the defense against invading pathogens. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant (2018-2023) for his project on the mechanism and the function of inflammatory cell death induced by the protein gasdermin-D. Broz is married and has two children.

Professor Annette Brühl

The new clinical professor for affective disorders at the Faculty of Medicine, Professor Annette Brühl, will begin her work at the university psychiatric clinics (UPK) on 1 August 2020. She will also be head of department at the center for affective, stress and sleep disorders at the university psychiatric clinic for adults. She has been deputy head of department at the clinic for psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychosomatics at the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich since 2018. She also heads the center for depression, anxiety disorders and psychotherapy, and leads a research group.

Brühl was born in Koblenz, Germany, in 1977 and studied medicine at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she obtained a doctorate from the Department of Pharmacology in 2004. She was involved in several clinical studies in the fields of psychiatry and neurology as a resident physician and clinical investigator, and later as a resident and attending physician in clinics including the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich (clinic for geriatric psychiatry and clinic for social psychiatry and general psychiatry). She has been an assistant lecturer in psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Zurich since 2008. Following her habilitation in 2013, she completed a three-year research stay at the University of Cambridge.

Brühl’s fields of research include the development of treatments for depression and anxiety disorders, the neurobiology of emotions, neurobiological mechanisms of affective and anxiety disorders and of therapies. She investigates the conditions of anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, and emotionally unstable personality disorders (borderline type). During her free time, she enjoys sport and exploring nature.

Professor Ruth Delzeit

The University Council appointed Professor Ruth Delzeit to the professorship for Global and Regional Land Use Change at the Faculty of Science. She will take up her post on 1 February 2021. The focus of her research is the economic analysis of global land use changes and water use. With the aid of modeling, she investigates the roles played by social, economic and biophysical factors, such as climate change, in these developments. She works in a transdisciplinary manner with partners from science, departmental policy and practice.

Delzeit was born in 1980 in Adenau, Germany, and studied geography at the University of Bonn where she subsequently obtained a doctorate in agricultural science. Research stays led her to the Technical University of Lisbon and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, for which she also worked as a consultant. She currently heads the Environment and Natural Resources research center at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Professor Scott McNeil

Prof. Dr. Scott McNeil is appointed Professor of Nanopharmaceutical and Regulatory Sciences at the Faculty of Science. This is the first of two endowed professorships in nanopharmacy funded by the Vifor Pharma Group. McNeil will take up his post 1 July 2020.

Until recently, McNeil has been the Director of the Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory in Frederick, Maryland (USA), a joint facility of the National Cancer Institute and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). His research focuses on the development and characterization of new nanopharmaceutical drugs and other non-biotechnologically produced active molecules.

McNeil was born in 1964 in Oregon and studied chemistry at Portland State University, followed by graduate studies in cell biology and anatomy at Oregon Health Sciences University, where he received his PhD. He was then Chief of Biochemistry at Tripler Medical Center in Hawaii and was also an adjunct professor at the John Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii. For the past 15 years he has been with Leidos Biomedical Research, where he was a Vice President. In addition to his academic career, he served for ten years as an officer in the US Army. McNeil and his wife, Merle, have six children, aged 18 to 26.

Professor Corinne Zellweger-Gutknecht

The University Council has selected Professor Corinne Zellweger-Gutknecht as professor for private law with a special focus on corporate and commercial law (50%). She is currently working at the Kalaidos University of Applied Sciences and as a lecturer at the University of Zurich, and will take up her post in the Faculty of Law at the University of Basel on 1 August.

Zellweger-Gutknecht was born in Bern, Switzerland, and studied at the University of Bern where she also worked as a research assistant, and obtained a doctorate in 2007 on the subject of warranty as a risk responsibility. This was followed by stays as a postdoc at the University of Zurich and as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for foreign and international private law in Hamburg, at the House of Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt and at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris.

In 2009, Zellweger-Gutknecht was admitted as a lawyer for the canton of Zurich and Switzerland. In 2014, she completed a habilitation with a venia legendi for civil and civil procedural law, financial market law and comparative law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich. From 2014 to 2016, she was an associate professor at the Centre for Banking and Financial Law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Geneva. She has been a professor for civil and civil procedural law, financial market, monetary and currency law, and comparative law at Kalaidos Law School in Zurich since 2017.

Zellweger-Gutknecht teaches and researches in the fields of monetary, currency and central banking law, and interdisciplinary issues between private and financial market law. She is particularly interested in the influence of digitization on state and private money, payment systems and the financial market, and the registration of crypto currencies in private, insolvency and currency law. She is married and has one child.

Two promotions

The University Council has advocated the promotion of two tenureships. Professor Julia Tischler has been appointed associate professor for African history in the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The University Council has also appointed Professor Aya Kachi associate professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics. Both appointments will begin on 1 August 2020.

Three adjunct professors

Furthermore, the University Council has approved Senate’s resolution to award adjunct professorships to Professor Jens Kuhle in neurology, Professor Cyrill A. Rentsch in urology and Professor Daniel Tobler in cardiology at the Faculty of Medicine.

Three approvals

The University Council has also authorized the following three approvals in the Faculty of Science: a professorship for pharmaceutical care in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and two professorships in the Department of Physics – namely, one for experimental quantum computing with semiconductors and the other for quantum computing and quantum condensed matter theory.

Further information

Dr. Angelika Jacobs, University of Basel, Communications, phone +41 61 207 63 04, email: angelika.jacobs@unibas.ch 

Photos

High-resolution images of the newly appointed professors are available in the media database.