University of Basel appoints three new professors

Professor Heide Elke Viehweger is to become the new clinical professor of neuroorthopedics in the Faculty of Medicine with a position at the University Children’s Hospital Basel (UKBB). She will take up her post on 1 October 2023.

Viehweger has been adjunct professor of orthopedic surgery and traumatology of the musculoskeletal system at the University of Basel since 2022. She has been vice chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and head of Neuroorthopedics and the Gait Laboratory at UKBB since 2020. As head of the Pediatric Orthopedic Biomechanics and Musculoskeletal Modeling research group, she is co-director of the focus group Clinical Biomechanics and Ergonomics Engineering (CADENCE), which heads the new Department of Biomedical Engineering (DBE) laboratory for movement analysis research. She is also part of the Surgical Outcome Research Center team at the University of Basel’s Department of Clinical Research (DKF).

She studied medicine in Giessen and at Aix-Marseille University and earned a doctorate at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI) in 2001, following her orthopedic surgery and traumatology residency at the University Hospitals in Paris. Research stays took her to clinics in France and to the Gillette Children’s Hospital and Clinics in St. Paul, Minnesota (USA). In 2007, she was awarded a PhD in economics and management sciences at Aix-Marseille University, specializing in methods of health system analysis, and in 2012 she gained an executive MBA in hospital administration and management at the ESCP Business School. From 2002 she worked as assistant professor, from 2006 as associate professor and from 2013 to 2020 as full professor at the University Hospital of Marseille.

Her multidisciplinary and translational clinical research focuses on outcome research based on health data, biomechanical movement analyses and patient-reported outcome measures, and on research into digital clinical decision aids.

The University Council has elected Professor Janina Grabs to the position of professor of sustainability research at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. This position will be based in the Department of Social Sciences and will begin on 1 June 2024.

Grabs studied political science at McGill University (Canada), agricultural and food economics at the University of Bonn and business and economics at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. In 2018 she earned a doctorate in political science at the University of Münster.

She has worked as a visiting researcher and postdoc at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University (USA) and at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich. Grabs has been assistant professor of business and society (with tenure track) at ESADE Business School in Barcelona since 2021.

Her research interests include the private and public regulation of sustainability in global value chains, international sustainability governance, and public policy, particularly with regard to agriculture, food and the environment. Other areas of her research include sustainable supply chain management and corporate social responsibility.

Professor Sonja Schmid has been appointed as the new assistant professor of physical chemistry (with tenure track) in the Faculty of Science. She will take up the post in the Department of Chemistry on 1 January 2024.

Schmid studied nanosciences at the University of Basel and received her PhD in 2017 from the Physics Department of the Technical University of Munich. Between 2017 and 2020, she conducted postdoctoral research at TU Delft, before commencing her tenure-track assistant professorship at Wageningen University (Netherlands) at the beginning of 2021.

Her research focuses on experimental single-molecule sensing and protein dynamics. Schmid and her team are developing novel nanopore and fluorescence/FRET technologies that enable, for example, real-time observations of the vital movements of biomolecules. These innovative tools have valuable applications in basic as well as applied research.