News

The Alfred Werner Scholarship Program of the SCS Foundation, financed by private donors and the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industries, supports highly talented students who earned their BSc degree abroad and perform their Master’s studies in Chemistry, Biochemistry, or Pharmaceutical Sciences at a Swiss University or Federal Institute of Technology. This year, the committee selected Tudor Lile, Derek Ong Boon Hong, and Leonardo Kudsk Holberg from D-CHAB. Get to know them!

With the 2024 ETH Zurich Chemical Engineering Medal, the ICB recognizes Prof. Dr. Johan Rockström's cutting-edge research on absolute sustainability and the planetary boundaries framework. These approaches are now being applied to the environmental assessment of chemical processes. Join us in the award ceremony & lecture on January 17, 2025 where Prof. Rockström will talk about “Advancing the Planetary Boundary Framework for World Stewardship of Earth”.

Whether for cling film or hydrogen production, in chemistry, everything strives for efficient, inexpensive catalysts. Surprisingly, little is known about how they work on a molecular level. Prof. Murielle Delley from the University of Basel aims to change this and is developing methods to promote the production of more efficient, sustainable catalysts. She has now been awarded the 2024 Ruzicka Prize for her work on the controlled surface modification of cobalt phosphide with sulfur. A portrait.

Jörg Scheuermann, currently Private Lecturer at ETH is appointed as Adjunct Professor in the D-CHAB. Jörg Scheuermann is an internationally recognised researcher in the field of DNA-Encoded Chemical Libraries (DEL) technology. Prof. Peter Chen, Full Professor of Physical-Organic Chemistry, will retire at the end of July 2025. Peter Chen joined ETH Zurich in 1994. In his research recognized by multiple awards he combines detailed physical measurements with the planning and synthesis of molecules.

Cells constantly process complex signals, be they for survival, metabolism, development, or cell death. Anyone who can spy on this internal communication has a decisive advantage regarding the development of new therapies. Michelle Frei, the new Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology and Molecular Imaging, and her team are developing chemical tools to better visualize and study cellular processes using fluorescent markers. In this article, she introduces herself.

Since 2017, Elvan Kut Bacs has been striving to provide pharmacists with the best possible training for their future tasks, sometimes using unorthodox teaching methods. The lecturer and program coordinator of the Master's program in Pharmacy at D-CHAB has now been awarded the Golden Owl 2024 for her dedicated teaching. In this interview, she reveals what makes good teaching and why fiction can sometimes be helpful, especially in fact-based science.

This year's annual ranking of the world's most cited researchers by Clarivate lists 6,886 researchers who have strongly influenced their own or several research areas through their publication activities. The list contains the most cited publications of the last ten years. Javier Pérez-Ramírez, Maksym Kovalenko and Gisbert Schneider (D-BSSE, D-CHAB) are among the 22 highly cited researchers at ETH Zurich. 

The prize for the most promising invention of the past year goes to Marie Amélie Perrin and Victor Mougel. They have developed a method that enables rare earth elements to be efficiently recovered from electrical waste.

As part of the ETH Day 2024 celebrations, Dr. Miguel Steiner received the IBM Research Award 2024 for his dissertation on navigating the catalytic reaction space with automated and controlled mechanism exploration approaches. The prize, sponsored by IBM Research Zurich Laboratory, is awarded alternately to outstanding master's and doctoral theses in the fields of computational chemistry, physics, biology and materials science.