Three new professors at the University of Basel
The University Council has appointed Professor Andrea Hofmann as Professor of Church History and History of Theology as well as Professor Angelo Ranaldo as the new Professor of Finance and Financial Economics. Professor Sarah Koch is to become the new Assistant Professor of Exercise and Training Science.
24 October 2023
Professsor Andrea Hofmann will be the new professor of church history and history of theology at the Faculty of Theology. She will start her position on 1 January 2024.
Andrea Hofmann studied theology and musicology in Heidelberg and Salzburg. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Heidelberg in 2013 with a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Subsequently, she worked as a research associate at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz (combined with a teaching assignment at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Mainz) and at the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
After completing her habilitation in Mainz in 2022 with a dissertation on "Images of War in Protestant Sermons and Devotional Writings of the First World War," she was a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, filling the chair of Modern History of Christianity. Since 2022, she has been a Junior Fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, and since October 2023, she has held a fellowship at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel.
Her research work primarily focuses on recent and contemporary church history. She is known for her high degree of interdisciplinarity and the ability to relate to different areas within theology and its neighboring disciplines.
Finance and Financial Economics
The University Council has elected Prof. Dr. Angelo Ranaldo as Professor of Finance and Financial Economics. Ranaldo has been Chair of Finance and Systemic Risk at the University of St. Gallen since 2012. He will take up his position at the Faculty of Business and Economics on 1 August 2024.
Angelo Ranaldo studied Economics and Finance at Bocconi University in Milan and received his PhD from the University of Fribourg in 2000. He then worked as an analyst in asset management before joining the Swiss National Bank in 2004 as an Economic Advisor and member of Senior Management. In 2012, he was appointed to the University of St. Gallen. He has also been Senior Chair at the Swiss Finance Institute since June 2022.
During his career, he has worked with prestigious institutions, including the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank, for which he serves as a member of the Bank Council, and the European Central Bank, which awarded him a Wim Duisenberg Fellowship.
Ranaldo has published numerous articles on financial economics in leading academic journals, particularly in the areas of asset pricing, international finance, and market microstructure. His publications underscore the social relevance of his research, which also addresses critical issues such as inefficiency and instability in the financial system.
Exercise and Training Science
Professsor Sarah Koch has been appointed as the new assistant professor of exercise and training science (with tenure track) at the Faculty of Medicine. She will take up her post at the Department of Sport, Exercise and Health on 1 August, 2024.
Sarah Koch studied sport sciences at Berlin’s Humboldt University and the University of Potsdam, as well as human physiology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada). In 2018, she earned her PhD in environmental and exercise physiology at the UBC, and worked there as a postdoctoral researcher until 2019 looking at the effects of physical activity on health in children using an omics-approach.
In 2019, she joined the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie funded research fellow to study the combined effects of physical activity and environmental exposures.
One of her research interests is studying the impact of environmental factors and climate change on health and athletic performance across the entire age, health and disease spectrum. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, she aims to better understand how climate change affects the health benefits of physical activity, but also how physical activity can serve as a sustainable solution in the mitigation of environmental threats linked to climate change and continued urbanization.
Four adjunct professorships
The University Council has approved the decision by the Senate to appoint the following adjunct professors:
Faculty of Medicine
- Professor Christoph T. Berger for Internal Medicine
- Professor Mathias Worni for Surgery
Faculty of Sciences
- Professor Georg Keller for Neurobiology
- Professor Hanns-Christian Mahler for Pharmaceutical Sciences
