ETH Day 2021
ETH Zurich celebrated its 166th anniversary at this year’s ETH Day on November 20 2021 together with guests from research, politics, and industry.
As a tradition, ETH Zurich takes the opportunity to honour members of its community who have distinguished themselves over the past year. The VSETH student association has celebrated teachers who went the extra mile for their students in this difficult year, and three students from the Department of Mathematics have given insights into their work.
Impressions
Please find more pictures external page in this gallery.
Video recording of this year's ETH Day:
Prof. Dr. Sarah M. Springman
Rector of ETH Zurich
Sarah Springman has been Rector of ETH Zurich since 2015 and Full Professor for Geotechnical Engineering at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering since 1997. As Rector, she oversees the Executive Board domain of teaching and is responsible for matters relating to teaching and for the organisation and quality assurance of the academic programme. In addition, she is deputy to the President. She studied engineering at Cambridge University, before working in the construction industry. She then returned to Cambridge as a doctoral student and went on to become a research fellow and lecturer there.
Prof. Dr. Joël Mesot
President of ETH Zurich
Joël Mesot has been Full Professor of Physics since 2008 and also President of ETH Zurich since 2019. ETH Zurich was where he originally studied and obtained a doctoral degree in solid state physics. As President, he assumes overall legal and political responsibility for the university. He heads the process for appointing new professors and defines the strategy together with the Executive Board and other ETH bodies. His duties also include managing relations with official bodies, policymakers and the public. Between 2008 and 2018, he was Director of the Paul Scherrer Institute. Previously, he spent many years doing research in France and the United States in the field of solid state physics.
Federal Councillor Simonetta Sommaruga
Head of the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (DETEC)
Having obtained her Matura university entry qualification, Simonetta Sommaruga trained to be a pianist at Lucerne Conservatory. After several years on the concert circuit, she became Executive Director of the Swiss Foundation for Consumer Protection in 1993 and served as its president from 2000 to 2010. Councillor Sommaruga embarked on a political career in 1997 as a member of Köniz Municipal Council, a role she occupied until 2005. In 1999, she was elected to the Swiss National Council, where she remained until 2003 – the year of her election to the Swiss Council of States. She was elected to the Swiss Federal Council in 2010 and headed the Federal Department of Justice and Police (EJPD) until the end of 2018. In 2019, she took over the reins at the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (DETEC). She became President of the Swiss Confederation for the second time in 2020, having previously held the office in 2015. Councillor Sommaruga is married to the writer Lukas Hartmann.
Honorary Doctor of ETH Zurich
By awarding honorary doctorates, ETH Zurich recognises people for their outstanding academic work and honours their significant achievements in research, teaching and practice or in the synthesis of research and practical work.
Newly appointed Honorary Doctor of ETH Zurich in 2021:
Prof. Dr. Aviv Regev
Executive Vice President & Global Head, Genentech Research and Early Development
for the invention of groundbreaking experimental and bioinformatics procedures for researching cellular systems.
Molecular processes control gene expression in the cell and determine cell health and tissue formation. As such, the key to treating diseases lies in understanding biological networks. This is something Aviv Regev recognised early on. She is a pioneer in the computational genome analysis of individual cells, which searches for patterns that can be attributed to certain symptoms or disorders. Aviv Regev is Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and Founding Director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute (MIT/Harvard University). She became Head of Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche, in 2020. Based in San Francisco, the company was also quick to realise the huge potential of biological data analysis for the treatment of diseases and in particular for personalised medicine. On top of this, the dual citizen of Israel and the United States has chaired the Human Cell Atlas, an international programme for mapping the full variety of human cells, since 2016.
Dr. sc. nat. Germaine J. F. Seewer
Commander of the Armed Forces College and Deputy Chief of Training and Education Command
for her extraordinary personal commitment to nurturing young talent at ETH Zurich and for acting as a role model, especially to young women who are forging a career in traditionally male professions.
Dr Germaine J. F. Seewer studied chemistry at ETH Zurich and completed her doctorate in 1993. Subsequently, she worked as a postdoc at Foulum Research Centre in Denmark and at the Swiss Federal Institute for Livestock Research in Posieux. In 1998, Ms Seewer joined the Swiss Federal Department of the Military as a specialist instructor. In 2004, she was promoted to Chief of Operations and Deputy Chief of Missions at SWISSINT, a centre of expertise for international peacekeeping. She served as a Staff Officer with Swisscoy peace support operations in Kosovo and as a UN Military Observer in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In 2013, the Swiss Federal Council promoted her to the rank of Brigadier and at the same to Chief of Armed Forces Personnel. Since 2020, Ms Seewer has been Commander of the Armed Forces College and Deputy Chief of Training and Education Command. The ETH alumna is the first career soldier in Switzerland to attain the rank of major general.
Dr. sc. techn. Suzanne Thoma
CEO of BKW AG
for her extraordinary personal commitment to furthering teaching and research at ETH Zurich, particularly in the fields of energy and physics and in the fostering of talent.
Dr Suzanne Thoma studied chemical engineering at ETH Zurich and completed her doctorate in 1989. After that, she worked for Ciba Spezialitätenchemie AG (today BASF AG) until 2002. From 2002 to 2007, Ms Thoma was the CEO of Rolic Technologies AG, a start-up specialised in high-tech materials and technology licences. Next, she managed the international automotive supplier business of the WICOR Group in Rapperswil, Switzerland, for two years until 2009. As of 2010, she has worked for the BKW Group, which is listed on the stock exchange and has operations in various countries. Since 2013, Ms Thoma has been CEO of the company and its 11,000 employees. In addition, she is Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of Sulzer AG, Member of the Board of Directors of the Oerlikon Group, Vice-Chair of the think tank Avenir Suisse, and Member of the Board of Directors of the Swiss Startup Group.
Endowed by ABB Switzerland, this award is given to outstanding dissertations in the fields, alternately, of power engineering and information and automation technology. In 2021, the award goes to two young researchers in information and automation technology:
Dr Yannick Salamin
for his doctoral thesis “Integrated Plasmonic Detectors and Mixers for Microwave and Terahertz Applications”
Tibor Schneider
for his Master’s thesis “Snowcap: Synthesizing Network-Wide Configuration Updates”
The Association of Students at ETH Zurich (VSETH) represents the interests of students to the Executive Board and university bodies. On ETH Day, the President of VSETH Nils Jensen will be awarding particularly dedicated lecturers the Golden Owl for their excellence in teaching. One lecturer in each department is selected by students to receive this mark of their approval.
Students can evaluate all teachers for whom they have attended at least one lecture. Titles, origin, training and quality of research are all here – all that counts is the quality and commitment of lecturers’ teaching. Based on these ratings, the student associations select the prizewinners. Factors considered include the teaching materials used by the lecturers, their dedication outside the classroom or lecture hall, and the quality of supervision they offer to students.
Dr. Meike Akveld
The Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching was launched in 2006 by the Credit Suisse Foundation in collaboration with the universities, institutes of technology and universities of applied sciences. In this way, the Foundation enables Swiss institutes of higher education to honour their best teachers every year. At ETH Zurich, candidates for the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching are nominated based on the student survey for awarding the Golden Owl. Drawing on the overall ranking and additional criteria, VSETH and the student associations determine the winner of the award.
Matthias Wellershoff completed a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich and in 2017 started his doctorate at the Seminar for Applied Mathematics under the supervision of Professor Rima Alaifari. For the past two years, he has also been Chair of the Board of Directors of 3am family office AG, which operates as the fund manager for an investment product. His research focuses on what’s called the phase retrieval problem, which has applications in audio processing and crystallography. In particular, he is interested in the question as to how errors in measurement data can impair phase retrieval processes.
Chris Busenhart
Chris Busenhart completed a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Zurich and a Master’s degree in mathematics at ETH Zurich. Next, he began his doctorate at ETH Zurich in 2020, also in the field of mathematics, under Professor Norbert Hungerbühler and Dr Lorenz Halbeisen. He is particularly interested in geometric problems that can be reformulated in algebraic equivalents. For example, he conducts research into algorithms for how to construct integral non-collinear sets of points on a plane for any finite number of points, or how to calculate primitive Pythagorean triples using the prime factors of Gaussian numbers.
Viera Klasovitá
Viera Klasovitá studied mathematics at ETH Zurich. For her Bachelor’s thesis, she explored a special class of random graphs called Erdös-Rényi graphs. This was when she realised that applied mathematics was the direction she wanted to pursue. For this reason, she looked into the domain of mathematical optimisation, among other areas. She found this subject area particularly fascinating, and so she decided to do a Master’s thesis in the group supervised by Professor Rico Zenklusen. There she is investigating whether it is possible to reduce a variant of the travelling salesman problem to the original problem.