Professor
Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Viola Vogel is Professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST) and is directing the Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Frankfurt (1987) based on research at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen (1980-88). After her postdoctoral studies in the Department of Physics at UC Berkeley in nonlinear optics, she started her academic career at the University of Washington Seattle in Bioengineering (1990-2004) and was the founding Director of the Center for Nanotechnology (1997-2003). She initially joined the Department of Materials when coming to ETH in 2004, and then co-founded (2012) the Department Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST), in which she later served as Vice Chair (2016-2018) and then Chair (2018-2020). To enhance translational aspects, she became an Einstein Visiting Fellow at Charité Berlin (2018). As most knowledge in Biology and Medicine is based on equilibrium structures of proteins, even today, she co-founded the ETH start-up Company Tandem Therapeutics in 2023 with the goal to exploit emerging knowledge in Mechanobiology for medical applications, with a focus in regenerative medicine. She pioneered the rapidly growing field of Molecular Mechanobiology and its medical applications. She discovered many structural mechanisms how mechanical forces can turn proteins into mechano-chemical switches. She showed how bacteria, platelets, immune and stem cells are functionally tuned by mechanobiological factors, and how this impacts our abilities to fight infections, as well as blood coagulation and tissue growth processes. Her work was internationally recognized by numerous awards. She serves on the Jury of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (since 2015) and was elected into the Leopoldina (2018), Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (2019), US National Academy of Engineering (2020) and National Academy of Sciences (2021), and the Royal Academy of Engineering UK (2023).
Sunday, June 23, 2024
15:45 – 16:00 ICT