Dr. Oliver Renn

Oliver Renn re-joined the ETH Zurich in September 2012 as Head of the Chemistry | Biology | Pharmacy Information Center. He started studying landscape architecture and design at TU Munich and Scandinavian studies at the University of Munich, where he then studied chemistry. After the Vordiplom he transferred to the University of Freiburg, where he graduated in 1988. After his PhD in bioinorganic Chemistry in 1990 at the University of Dortmund he continued working in cancer research at the University of California at Davis. Further steps of his academic career include positions at TU Dortmund and ETH Zurich (organometallic chemistry). In 1996, he went into scientific publishing, first as an editor at S. Karger Publishers and from 1998 as Publishing Director at Bertelsmann-Springer in Munich. In 2002, he joined the management board of a start-up company focusing on knowledge management and discovery in oncology. From 2003 to 2012 he was responsible for the global Scientific Information Center of pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, where he set up, e.g. the functions Knowledge Management and Text Mining.

Since 2014 he has been a lecturer at the ETH Zurich, since 2015 he additionally has been Head of Science Communication D-CHAB and since the end of 2019 he is also Head of the public relations of the D-CHAB.