New professorships in data analysis, musicology and pharmacy

­Dr. Aurélien Lucchi has been appointed Assistant Professor (with tenure track) of Data Analytics Systems at the Faculty of Science by the President’s Board of the University of Basel. Dr. Lucchi is French and he received his PhD in Computer Science from EPF Lausanne in 2014 with the thesis "Learning discriminative features and Structured Models for Segmentation in Microscopy and Natural Images" in collaboration with neuroscientists to develop algorithms for the analysis of large-scale electron microscopy data. His research focuses on machine learning, stochastic optimization and deep learning.

Dr. Lucchi has been a senior researcher at the Institute for Machine Learning at ETH Zurich since 2018, where he led several projects in the area of optimization for machine learning and generative models, as well as various applied projects in cosmology, quantum computing and environmental engineering. He created and led a consulting service to help research groups at ETH Zurich apply machine learning. He has previously worked as a research intern at Microsoft and Google. He will join the University of Basel on 1 January 2022.

Appointment of assistant professors

The President’s Board of the University of Basel has appointed two researchers to new assistant professorships: In the Faculty of Science, Dr. Samuel Allemann will commence as Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Care (without tenure track) on 1 August 2021. The federally qualified pharmacist obtained a doctorate from the University of Basel in 2017 has been working at the university as a postdoc since 2019. In the period between, he was awarded an Early Postdoc.Mobility scholarship by the Swiss National Science Foundation to carry out health services research at the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1.

He previously worked as a clinical pharmacist for Solothurner Spitäler and as an expert for the Swiss pharmacists’ association pharmaSuisse. Allemann is president of the Swiss Young Pharmacists Group (swissYPG).

Dr. Hanna Walsdorf has worked as an assistant lecturer for the “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” University of Music and Theater’s Institute for Musicology in Leipzig and for the department of Music and Dance Studies at the University of Salzburg since 2020. Between 2014 and 2020, she was a lecturer at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Leipzig and head of the Emmy Noether junior research group “Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage”. Prior to that, she worked as a research assistant and lecturer at several higher education institutions in Germany. The President’s Office of the University of Basel has appointed Walsdorf Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (without tenure track) with effect from 1 February 2022.

Having studied Musicology, Political Science and Historical Auxiliary Sciences and Archives at the Universities of Salzburg and Bonn, she earned her doctorate in 2009 with her thesis “Political Instrumentalization of Folk Dance in the German Dictatorships. A Comparison”. She specializes in music and dance of the baroque period and the 20th century. Walsdorf was born in Oberhausen (Germany) in 1982 and has one child.

Promotion in the Faculty of Business and Economics

Professor Catherine Roux has been appointed Associate Professor of Industrial Organization in the Faculty of Business and Economics, commencing in the fall semester 2021. Roux has worked as an assistant professor since 2015 and her research focuses on competition policy, collusion and regulatory intervention.

Three adjunct professorships

The University Council has approved the decision by the Senate to appoint the following adjunct professors in the Faculty of Medicine:

• Professor Isabel Filges for Medical Genetics
• Professor Andreas Holbro for Hematology
• Professor Klaus W. Neuhaus for Restorative Dentistry

Approval of two professorships

The University Council has approved two new professorships in the Faculty of Science: the Clinical Professorship in Visceral Surgery and the Professorship in Tissue Assembly, Physiology and Engineering.