Andrea Schenker-Wicki elected President of Eucor – The European Campus

At a meeting of the heads of the member universities of Eucor – The European Campus on 9 June 2021, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Andrea Schenker-Wicki, President of the University of Basel, was elected to the role of President of Eucor. Prof. Dr. Thomas Hirth, Vice-President for Innovation and International Affairs at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), was elected deputy. The statutory period in office is three years.

Andrea Schenker-Wicki has been deputy President of Eucor – The European Campus since May 2016 and took on the acting presidency temporarily following the departure of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans-Jochen Schiewer in October 2020. Her goal for her period in office is to strengthen the group with practical projects: “The universities in the Upper Rhine region have massive potential which we want to make more use of within the group, especially for our priority area Personalized Health, in which we want to establish a dynamic internationally networked research and innovation cluster together.”

Following her degrees at the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, and a doctorate at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland), Schenker-Wicki qualified as a lecturer at the University of St. Gallen in 1996. At the University of Zurich she held a full professorship in Business Administration from 2001 to 2015 and was Vice-President for Law and Economics from 2012 to 2014. Since August 2015 she has been the President of the University of Basel.

Cross-border funding for innovation and transfer

Thomas Hirth has been a member of the boards of Eucor – The European Campus since 2016. He wants to focus on cross-border funding for innovation and transfer: “The key to making the Eucor alliance even more innovative, sustainable and competitive in the framework of the trinational metropolitan area Upper Rhine region (TMO) lies in the cooperation of science, industry and society.”

Hirth studied and gained his doctorate in Chemistry at the former University of Karlsruhe (now KIT). In 2007 he became the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology (IGB) in Stuttgart. He held a professorship at the University of Stuttgart from 2008 to 2016 and from 2012 to 2015 was Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Energy-, Process- and Bio-Engineering. In January 2016 Hirth took up the post of Vice-President for Innovation and International Affairs at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Further information

Matthias Geering, University of Basel, Head of Communications & Marketing, phone: +41 61 207 35 75, mobile: +41 79 269 70 71, email: matthias.geering@unibas.ch