A new set of duties for the new year
Lorenz Hurni, Vice-Rector for Study Programmes, Gisbert Schneider, Associate Vice President ETH Global, and Lothar Thiele, Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation: Three key posts at ETH Zurich have been newly staffed.
One major reason behind the success of ETH Zurich is its bottom-up approach, which allows individual professorships and departments a great deal of freedom to develop individually. But ETH Zurich is more than the sum of its parts. In order to make advances in key strategic areas and to coordinate tasks throughout the entire university, ETH relies on the work and commitment of selected professors who take on certain tasks as associate vice presidents or vice-rectors for the Executive Board. Three of these key functions have new appointments.
New Vice-Rector for Study Programmes
Lorenz Hurni, Professor of Cartography at ETH Zurich since 1996, will become the new Vice-Rector for Study Programmes in early 2018. He takes over from Joachim Buhmann, who is stepping down after four years in order to go to the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
As Vice-Rector for Study Programmes, Hurni will support the Rector in teaching-related projects. He is responsible for admission and exam administration for the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes, where he will assess in particular reconsideration requests and appeals. He is also responsible for quality management in the area of teaching and in this function is committee chairman of the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Programme (ESOP) and the admissions examination board.
Hurni has held several posts at ETH: as Associate Vice President for Professional Appointments, he was responsible for assessment of the academic achievements of candidates and their individual suitability for an ETH professorship. From 2009 to 2013, he served as Head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (D-BAUG).
Hurni is well known as editor-in-chief of the now multimedia Atlas of Switzerland, which has won multiple awards, and the Swiss World Atlas, which is the atlas for secondary school students commissioned by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK). He is a member of the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences, and sits on numerous national and international expert committees
New Associate Vice President ETH Global
Gisbert Schneider, Professor of Computer-Assisted Drug Design, will take up the post of Associate Vice President ETH Global as of 1 January 2018. He will replace Gerhard Schmitt, who established the position nine years ago and has played a pivotal role in its evolution. Schmitt moved to Singapore in October, where he heads up the Singapore ETH Center, which was established by him.
As Associate Vice President ETH Global, Schneider, and his staff unit of the same name, is in charge of implementation of ETH Zurich’s global strategy and is the first point of contact for all international matters. He will forge strategic alliances and partnerships to help scientists at ETH maintain and expand their global networks, since the actual international collaboration takes place primarily within the professorships.
Schneider received his PhD in 1994 at the Free University of Berlin. After several years working in the pharmaceutical industry (Roche, Basel) and his habilitation at the University of Freiburg (Germany), he took on a professorship in 2002 at Goethe University Frankfurt before joining ETH Zurich in 2010. Schneider is a fellow at the University of Tokyo and winner of the Herman Skolnik Award, to name just one of his most recent achievements. His research work focuses on the development and application of artificial intelligence methods for drug design of the future.
New Associate Vice President for Digital
Transformation
Lothar Thiele, Professor of Computer Engineering, was appointed Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation at the beginning of November 2017. The position has been newly created in the face of the rapid transformation process unfolding in industry and society, a process that also creates challenges in every area of university activity.
Thiele will coordinate new initiatives in digital transformation at ETH and promote specific projects, including identification of globally relevant future issues and connection of external partners with the right experts at ETH. Finally, it also aims to show how the leading role already played by ETH Zurich in this area can benefit Switzerland and the rest of the world. As Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation, Thiele represents ETH Zurich in networks, on committees and advisory boards, and not least at the political level.
Thiele’s research deals with cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, embedded systems and evolutionary algorithms. In 2015, he won the EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Design and Automation Association. Thiele is a co-editor of various scientific publications and member of several professional associations, including Leopoldina. He is also a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).