University of Basel Receives Five New SNSF Professorships
The University of Basel receives five of overall 39 new professorships awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) this year. Five young researchers, four men and one woman, have chosen the University of Basel as their host institution and will start their research groups at five different departments. The University thus receives more than 7.4 million Swiss Francs in external funding.
01 March 2018
The SNSF Professorships enable highly qualified young researchers to set up their own teams and to launch an independent research project. To do so, the seven scientists will receive up to 1.5 million Swiss Francs over the course of the next four years from the SNSF.
The mathematician Dr. David Belius received his doctorate in 2013 from ETH Zurich. He then worked at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques of the Université de Montréal and at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He has been a lecturer at the University of Zurich since 2016. His project investigates the extreme values of random landscapes that arise in models from mathematics and physics. The project is carried out at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
The evolutionary microbiologist Dr. Médéric Diard received his doctorate in 2008 from the Université Paris Diderot. Since 2009 he has been working at the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich as research assistant and lecturer. His research program will be performed at the Biozentrum and is focused on the ecology and evolution of virulence of entero-pathogenic bacteria.
PD Dr. Cristina Granziera received her doctorate in 2007 from the University of Lausanne, where she qualified as a professor in 2014. She worked at the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV) in Lausanne and as an assistant professor at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Her project will be carried out at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Neurological Clinic of the University Hospital Basel, where she has been working since end 2017. Using advanced magnetic resonance imaging methods, she will investigate nerve damage and repair in multiple sclerosis patients using machine learning techniques.
Dr. Gregor Hutter, MD PhD, received his doctorate in 2008 from the University of Zurich and completed his neurosurgery residency at the University Hospital Basel. He worked at the Cantonal Hospital in Lucerne, and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford. Since 2017 he has been working as a physician-scientist at the Clinic for Neurosurgery at the University Hospital Basel. His research project on malignant brain tumors (glioblastoma) investigates the interactions between microglia, T-cells, and tumor cells, and develops innovative treatment approaches using immunotherapeutic and biochemical methods. His research will be performed at the Department of Biomedicine and the Neurosurgery Clinic of the University Hospital Basel.
Dr. Jan-Friedrich Missfelder received his doctorate in 2008 from the Humboldt University of Berlin and has been working as a senior assistant at the University of Zurich since 2017. He will carry out his research project on the voice as a communication medium for early modern society in the Department of History. The project analyzes how songs and song pamphlets have contributed to the formation of opinion and contemporary historical consciousness.
Also, the SNSF has accepted the extension of the SNSF professorships of Prof. Nicolas Sangouard (Department of Physics), Prof. Kelly Tan (Biozentrum) and Prof. Dr. Roxane Tussiwand (Department of Biomedicine).
Further information
Prof. Dr. Edwin C. Constable, Vice President for Research, University of Basel, phone: +41 61 207 10 01, email: edwin.constable@unibas.ch
