Four new professors at the University of Basel

The University Council has appointed Professor Wolf E. Hautz as clinical professor of emergency medicine in the Faculty of Medicine, with a position at University Hospital Basel. He will take up his position on 1 January 2027 and take over as head of department of the Emergency Center at University Hospital Basel.

Wolf Hautz is currently associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Bern as well as senior physician and member of clinic management for the University Clinic for Emergency Medicine at Inselspital Bern. He is also a member of the Cantonal Ethics Committee of the Canton of Bern. After studying medicine at Charité Berlin, he completed his specialist training in anesthesiology and obtained certificates in emergency medicine and ultrasound. In addition, he completed a master’s degree in medical education from the University of Bern and the University of Illinois Chicago, and obtained his doctorate in the field of evidence-based medical training at Charité Berlin in 2015. In 2017, he completed his habilitation at the University of Bern. His career includes international research stays in the US and as a visiting scientist at the University of Oslo.

His academic work combines clinical emergency medicine with medical education, patient safety and quality development. It focuses primarily on research into diagnostic quality in acute medicine, the prognosis, diagnosis and treatment of emergency patients – particularly those in a critical condition – and decision support in acute medicine.

Systems developmental medicine

The new tenure track assistant professor of systems developmental medicine will be Dr. Marius Lange. He will take up his position in the Department of Biomedicine in the Faculty of Medicine and at the Basel Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) on 1 January 2027. The professorship is one of the three structural professorships at the BRCCH, which is jointly supported by the University of Basel and ETH Zurich.

Marius Lange is currently a postdoc in the Department of Biosystems at ETH Zurich in Basel and at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He studied physics at the University of Freiburg and applied mathematics at the University of Oxford before obtaining his doctorate in computational biology at the Technical University of Munich in 2022. As part of his academic career, he completed research stays at Helmholtz Munich, ETH Zurich, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has received several prestigious scholarships and honors, including an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship, the Rainer Rudolph Prize from the Rainer Rudolph Foundation and the Helmholtz Software Award.

His research focuses on understanding dynamic biological processes from the perspective of single-cell genomics. To this end, he develops computer-aided tools that he uses to investigate biological questions arising from processes such as development, regeneration and reprogramming. In particular, he examines the development of the human brain in organoid model systems. Here he integrates spatio-temporal data from different molecular modalities in order to understand regulatory relationships. At the University of Basel, he will apply these approaches to the development of human tissues and organs in early childhood.

Ibero-Romance and general linguistics

On 1 August 2026, Professor Sandra Schlumpf-Thurnherr will assume her new position as associate professor of Ibero-Romance and general linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has been an assistant professor of Ibero-Romance and general linguistics at the University of Basel since 2019.

Sandra Schlumpf-Thurnherr obtained her doctorate in Ibero-Romance linguistics in Basel in 2014 and completed her habilitation in Spanish linguistics in 2024 with a project on the Equatorial Guinean community in Madrid. Her academic career includes teaching and research assignments at the University of Basel and University of Bern, mentoring junior researchers, leadership roles at the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics Basel-Freiburg, and participation in national and international research collaborations.

Her research combines synchronous and diachronic approaches to language, with a particular focus on sociolinguistics, postcolonial linguistics, language contact, language and migration, Ladino, historical linguistics and varieties of Spanish in Spain, Latin America, Africa and Asia. In her fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, Spain and Switzerland, she investigates multilingualism, linguistic ideologies, language contact phenomena and language change.

Sustainability and behavioral change

Professor Florian Lange will become the new associate professor of sustainability and behavioral change in the Faculty of Psychology on 1 September 2026. He is currently junior professor of environmental psychology at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen.

Florian Lange studied psychology at TU Braunschweig and obtained his doctorate on changes in cognitive flexibility in neurodegenerative diseases from Medizinische Hochschule Hannover in 2016. From 2017, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, postdoc and senior researcher at KU Leuven. In 2026, he took up a junior professorship in environmental psychology at Zeppelin University.

His research focuses on the role of psychology in promoting sustainable behavioral change. Using laboratory and field experimental methods, he investigates how individuals make decisions relating to the environment and how contexts need to be designed in order to systematically reinforce environmentally friendly behavior. He is particularly interested in the effectiveness of interventions that change the financial, social and environmental consequences of behavior related to the environment.