Thomas Hengartner will take over the leadership of the Collegium Helveticum, which is jointly run by the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, for the next five years. The UZH professor wants to further strengthen scientific exchange between disciplines at universities in Switzerland and internationally.
The Collegium Helveticum , the Zurich Institute for Advanced Studies, sees itself as a laboratory for transdisciplinarity. The focus is on the dialogue between the natural sciences, technology, humanities, social sciences as well as art and medicine. Founded in 1997 by ETH Zurich and jointly supported with the University of Zurich since 2004, there is a change at the top of the Collegium Helveticum: Prof. Thomas Hengartner, University of Zurich, was elected as the new director for a term of five years as of January 1, 2016. He succeeds Prof. Gerd Folkers, ETH Zurich, who is stepping down at the end of 2015 to take on new responsibilities within ETH Zurich.
Thomas Hengartner has been Full Professor of Folklore since 2010, Associate Dean for Research at the UZH Faculty of Humanities since 2012 and, among other things, a member of the Committee of the Foundation Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation; he heads the Institute of Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies. The Leibniz Prize winner habilitated at the University of Bern, taught for 14 years at the University of Hamburg and held several management positions there. His areas of specialization include entertainment and communication media, sensory research, urbanity, and cultural studies of technology. Here he developed new approaches to the dialogue between nature and technology as well as the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies.
Making a gem shine
The Collegium Heveticum is already well anchored in the two sponsoring universities. My goal is to make this gem much better known as a think thank for interdisciplinary exchange, both internally and externally, but also to ask very fundamental questions about the possibilities and limits of transdisciplinarity, explains Thomas Hengartner. The Collegium Heveticum offers established scientists from UZH, ETH as well as other Swiss universities the opportunity to conduct research across disciplinary boundaries as fellows for five years. The fellows can network internationally at the highest level through the association of leading top researchers.
Gerd Folkers, Full Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at ETH Zurich, has successfully led the Collegium Helveticum since October 2004. Folkers deliberately positioned the Collegium Helveticum as a place where lateral thinking and thinking differently are not only given space, but are explicitly encouraged. He has moderated countless public events and has not shied away from controversial topics such as rankings, growth and genetic engineering. In addition, he actively participated in research projects on the borderline between the natural sciences and the humanities, for example within the focus of the past two Fellow periods on the topics of The role of emotions: their part in human action and in the setting of social norms and reproducibility, prediction and relevance.
