ETH Day 2024

Günther Dissertori has been Rector of ETH Zurich since February 2022 and Professor of Physics since 2001. As Rector, he is responsible for all matters relating to education and for the organisation and quality assurance of study operations. He is also Deputy President. The South Tyrolean studied and completed his doctorate at the University of Innsbruck. As a doctoral student, he conducted research at CERN in Geneva, where he later helped to set up the CMS experiment at the large particle accelerator. It was also thanks to this experiment that the Higgs particle was successfully detected. As a lecturer, Dissertori received the Golden Owl for good education from students four times, as well as the Award for Best Teaching

Joël Mesot has been a full professor of physics since 2008 and President of ETH Zurich since 2019, where he originally studied and completed his doctorate in solid-state physics. As President, he has overall legal and political responsibility for the university. He leads the process for appointing new professors and defines the strategy together with the Executive Board and other ETH bodies. He is also responsible for maintaining relations with the authorities, politicians and the public. Between 2008 and 2018, he was Director of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Prior to this, he spent several years conducting research in the field of solid-state physics in France and the USA.

Albert Rösti was elected to the Federal Council on 7 December 2022. He holds a Doctor of Sciences in Engineering and is an ETH engineer and agronomist. He completed an MBA in Bern and Rochester NY. Before his election to the Federal Council, he was the owner of a company active in public affairs and project management. From 2007 to 2013, he was Director of Swiss Milk Producers. In the years prior to this, Mr Rösti held various positions for the Canton of Bern, serving as Secretary General of the Canton of Bern's Department of Economic Affairs from 2003–2006. He has also held various association and organisation mandates over the years. Mr Rösti was elected to the Swiss Federal Parliament in 2011. Among other things, he was a member of the Environment, Spatial Planning and Energy Committee for eleven years and chaired the Social Security and Health Committee of the Member of the National Council in 2022. He was President of the Swiss People's Party (SVP) from 2016 to 2019.

Nic Cantieni grew up in Bonaduz near Chur, where he also attended primary school. At grammar school, he discovered his love of the Natural Sciences and particularly enjoyed maths and physics. In 2020, Cantieni came to ETH Zurich to study Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. In his final year of his bachelor's degree, he became involved in the Academic Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Association (AMIV) as a bursar. The student association represents the interests of students in two departments. He has now completed his first Master's year and has been President of the Union of Students at ETH Zurich (VSETH) since September 2024. The VSETH is the umbrella organisation for all students at ETH and, as the official student representative body, exercises its rights of participation at ETH. With 17 professional associations and various commissions, VSETH is also an integral part of student life at ETH.

Jason W. Chin is Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry. Chin studied at Oxford University, where he worked on cephalosporin biosynthesis. He completed his doctorate as a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University. As a Damon Runyon Fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, he developed the first approaches to systematically expand the genetic code of eukaryotic cells and pioneered now widely used approaches to define protein interactions by genetically encoding photocrosslinking amino acids. Chin's work has been recognised with a number of awards and he is a member of the European Inventors Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Scott Eric Denmark was born in Lynbrook, New York, USA, in 1953. He studied Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B.) and at ETH Zurich (D.Sc.Tech., 1980, A. Eschenmoser). In the same year, he began his independent career as assistant professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, becoming associate professor in 1986 and professor in 1987. In 1991, Denmark was named the Reynold C. Fuson Professor of Chemistry. Denmark has received numerous awards and honours, including the Prelog Medal of ETH Zurich (2007), the Paracelsus Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society (2020) and the Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society (2023). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017) and the US National Academy of Sciences (2018).

Helen H. Hobbs completed her Bachelor's (degree) studies at Stanford University, went on to study medicine at Case Western Reserve University, and completed her clinical training in internal medicine in Dallas, Texas. She was a postdoctoral researcher with Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein before becoming a professor at UT Southwestern in 1987. Hobbs is director of the McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development, UT Southwestern's Centre for Human Genetics. Her work is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Hobbs has received numerous awards for her groundbreaking work in genetics and lipid metabolism, including the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2015 Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.

Maria Leptin studied mathematics and Biology in Bonn and Heidelberg. From 1979 to 1983, she carried out her doctoral thesis on B cell activation at the Basel Institute for Immunology under Fritz Melchers. She then moved to the MRC in Cambridge, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Michael Wilcoy on Drosophila integrins. After a research visit with Pat O'Farrell in San Francisco, where she began her work on gastrulation, she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen from 1989 to 1994. She has been a professor at the Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne since 1994. From 2010 to 2021, Leptin was Director of EMBO, and since 2021 she has been President of the European Research Council. In these roles, she has played a key role in shaping the European research landscape.

Susan Trumbore, born in 1959, studied geology at the University of Delaware and received her doctorate in geochemistry from Columbia University in 1989. In 1991, she became a professor at the University of California, Irvine and was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena in 2009. She has also been an honorary professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena since 2013. Susan Trumbore has pioneered the use of radiocarbon as a tool to understand the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and to assess carbon fluxes in the Earth system in the context of climate and anthropogenic disturbances. She has been honoured many times for her outstanding scientific achievements, leadership and service to the wider scientific community. Honours include induction as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2010), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2015) and the Academia Europaea (2020).

Dipl. Ing. Walter Fust

Founder of Dipl. Ing. Fust AG, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the StarragTornos Group

for his pioneering spirit, his entrepreneurial achievements, his role model function and his great commitment to students with entrepreneurial ambitions.

Dipl. Ing. Walter Fust completed his studies in mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich in 1964. He was already running a mail order business during his training. From 1966, he built up Dipl. Ing. Fust AG, a major electrical retail company, which he sold to the Coop Group in 2007. From the end of the 1980s, he was the majority shareholder and later Chairman of the Board of Directors of the mechanical engineering company Starrag (now StarragTornos) for many years, acquired stakes in other companies and was active in the property sector. He is a co-founder of Inspire, the technology transfer centre set up on the initiative of ETH Zurich and Swiss industry.

Dr Andréa M. Maechler

Deputy General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)

for her great commitment to promoting technology transfer to the economy, particularly in the field of Computer Science, and for her role as a role model for women in management positions.

Andréa M. Maechler studied at the University of Toronto and the Graduate Institute (formerly IUHEI) in Geneva and received her doctorate in International Economics from the University of California in 2000. Her professional experience includes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). From 2015 to 2023, she was a member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and responsible for Department III, Money Market and Foreign Exchange, Asset Management, Banking Operations and Computer Science. Andréa M. Maechler has been Deputy General Manager of the BIS in Basel since September 2023.

Sandra Haltmeier is doing her doctorate at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology under Professor Sebastian Kozerke in the field of cardiovascular magnetic resonance. She began her academic career in 2017 with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich. The co-development of an augmented reality (AR) app for cardiac surgery at the University Hospital Zurich sparked her passion for Medical Technology. During her subsequent Master's degree studies in biomedical engineering, she expanded her technical and cultural skills with a semester abroad at the University of British Columbia. Haltmeier completed her Master's degree studies in 2023 at the top of her class. Her Master's thesis on automatic, AI-based evaluation of aortic valve calcification, which Haltmeier wrote in cooperation with Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, was awarded the ETH Medal.

Reinhard Wiesmayr

Reinhard Wiesmayr received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees, both with distinction, in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich in 2019 and 2022. He was a scholarship holder of the Max Weber Programme and the “Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes”. Since 2022, he has been doing his doctorate at ETH Zurich under Christoph Studer, Professor of Integrated Information Processing. Wiesmayr was awarded an NVIDIA Research Graduate Fellowship for his research at ETH Zurich and recently completed a practical placement at NVIDIA Research. His research focuses on signal processing and machine learning methods for future wireless communication systems.