ETH News

At its meeting of 9 and 10 July 2025 and upon application of Jo?l Mesot, President of ETH Zurich, the ETH Board appointed eight professors. The Board also awarded the title of "Professor of Practice" once.

The Vice President Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations, Vanessa Wood, will step down from the ETH Executive Board effective December 2025. She looks back at her leadership roles within ETH and on the successful establishment of the new Vice Presidency.

For the first time, researchers at ETH Zurich have successfully produced hundreds of different types of nerve cell from human stem cells in Petri dishes. In the future, it will thus be possible to investigate neurological disorders using cell cultures instead of animal testing.

ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the ¡°Alps¡± supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM marks a milestone in open-source AI and multilingual excellence.

ETH Zurich will receive 10 million Swiss francs a year from the J?rg G. Bucherer-Foundation for the next ten years. The university will use the funds to establish a competence centre for Earth observation with global appeal and a physical presence in the Canton of Lucerne. The Canton of Lucerne is to support the project as infrastructure partner.

A new 3D simulation tool developed by ETH and SLF researchers now allows for significantly more accurate predictions of complex alpine mass movements, supporting alpine risk management.

Chronic wounds are a major medical challenge, burdening healthcare systems with billions of dollars in costs every year. Pioneer Fellow B?rte Emiroglu is developing a new product: a selective, sponge-like hydrogel that reduces inflammatory signals and actively promotes healing.

High temperatures and more frequent heatwaves are causing many people to doubt whether high-density urban planning is still sustainable. However, building physicist Jan Carmeliet argues that even dense cities can be cool if they are planned correctly.?

Giuseppe Antoniazzi is developing a diagnostic toolkit that gives early warning of fibrotic diseases. In doing so, this Pioneer Fellow wishes to contribute to the early detection of tissue scarring, which is usually noticed too late and can barely be halted, and enable countermeasures to be implemented.

Using nuclear magnetic resonance, researchers at ETH Zurich have studied the atomic environments of single platinum atoms in solid supports as well as their spatial orientation. In the future, this method can be used to optimize the production of single-atom catalysts.