Three new professors at the University of Basel

Professor Carolyn King has been appointed Professor of Infection Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine by the University Council. She will take up her new position on 1 October 2022.

Carolyn King, born in 1975, received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Research stays took her to the University of California, San Francisco and to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, among others. Since 2008, she has worked at the University of Basel as a postdoctoral fellow as well as an Ambizione Fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). She was also a visiting scientist at ETH Zürich’s Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering. In 2016, Carolyn King was appointed SNSF Professor and Group Leader at the Department of Biomedicine. For her research, the immunologist was awarded the Amerbach Prize of the University of Basel in 2021 and an ERC Consolidator Grant this year.

King’s research explores how different immune cells develop specialized functions to clear infections and generate memory cells. Immune cells that reside in tissues are of particular interest. The goal is to address the biological underpinnings and therapeutic potential of mucosal immunity. In this way, King hopes to provide approaches to combat respiratory pathogens, including influenza and tuberculosis.

Professor Mattia Zampieri has been appointed Professor of Biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine. He will take up his position at the Department of Biomedicine on 1 January 2023.

Mattia Zampieri, born in 1982, studied Bioengineering at the University of Padua. After being a visiting scientist at Boston University, he completed his PhD studies in 2011 at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste with a thesis on Functional and Structural Genomics. Since then, he has been working at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich, first as a postdoc and since 2016 as a Junior PI. Mattia Zampieri is also involved as a co-research group leader in the National Center of Competence in Research AntiResist, which is based at the University of Basel.

His research interest is the understanding of fundamental principles in the regulation of cell metabolism and how to exploit them for therapeutic applications. This includes the development of new experimental and computational methods to study how cancer cells respond to genetic and chemical perturbations (e.g. drug treatment). Data-based analyses of biochemical networks could also provide the basis for predicting how to hamper the evolution of drug resistance.

Professor Admir Greljo is appointed Assistant Professor (with tenure track) of Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology. He will assume his new position on 1 February 2023.

Admir Greljo, born in 1989, studied at the University of Sarajevo and received his PhD from the University of Ljubljana in 2014. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the Physics Institute of the University of Zurich and the Institute of Physics of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. From 2018-2020, he worked as a senior research fellow in the CERN Theoretical Physics Division. Since 2020, he has held an SNSF Eccellenza Professorship at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Bern, where he established his first research group.

Greljo’s research interests cover a wide range of particle physics and cosmology topics. He is investigating theoretical grounds for new physical phenomena discoverable at present and future high-energy colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His SNSF-funded research project aims at understanding why the elementary particles of matter replicate in three generations and why they have such peculiar masses.

The University Council has approved the announcement of the professorship of Finance and Financial Economics at the Faculty of Business and Economics and the establishment of a search committee.