Prof. Dr. Michael O. HENGARTNER

President of the ETH Board

Prof. Dr. Michael Hengartner is President of the ETH Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the ETH Domain. The Swiss-Canadian citizen, born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, grew up in Québec City, Canada, and studied biochemistry at the Université Laval. After his PhD studies at MIT with Nobel laureate H. R. Horvitz, he led a research group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the USA for seven years. In 2001, he became the first occupant of the newly founded Ernst Hadorn Endowed Chair for molecular biology at the University of Zurich. From 2009 to 2014, he was dean of the Faculty of Science, and from 2014 to 2020 president of the University of Zurich. From 2016 to 2020, he served as president of swissuniversities, the Swiss Rectors' Conference.

Prof. Dr. Hengartner holds an Executive MBA from IMD, Lausanne and is the recipient of several awards for his research on the molecular basis of apoptosis, among them the Swiss National Latsis Prize, Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award, and an honorary doctorate from Sorbonne Université. In 2010, he received the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching at the University of Zurich.

He founded and/or was a member of the board of directors of a number of start-up companies, including the biotech company Devgen NV, in Belgium (co-founded in 1997) and the scientific consultancy company EvalueSCIENCE SA, in Switzerland (co-founded in 2008), and is an independent board member of the Kudelski Group (since 2020). In 2022 he became a board member of GESDA.