Seven New SNSF Professorships for the University of Basel

The SNSF Professorships enable highly qualified young researchers to set up their own teams and to launch an independent research project. To do so, the seven scientists will receive up to 1.6 million Swiss Francs over the course of the next four years from the SNSF.

The new SNSF professorships cover a broad range of academic disciplines at the University of Basel: The highly qualified young researchers take up their positions in the departments of Biomedical Engineering, Biomedicine, Biozentrum, Mathematics and Computer Science, Languages and Literature, Environmental Sciences and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH).

Dr. Ferran Antolín finished his PhD in 2013 at the University of Barcelona. He is currently working as a postdoc in Integrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science at the University of Basel. His project at the Department of Environmental Sciences addresses the agricultural change and its causes during the Neolithic, particularly in connection to climate fluctuations.

Dr. Jan Gründemann earned his PhD at the University College London in 2011. Today, he is an SNSF Ambizione Fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. At the Department of Biomedicine, he will launch a project in the field of Neurophysiology and brain research, especially investigating the role of sensory integration during associative learning.

Dr. Pierre Le Boudec finished his PhD at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche in 2012. Currently, he is working as an Instructor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His research is at the interface between Analytic Number Theory and Diophantine Geometry. His project at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science will use analytic number theory techniques to investigate quantitative aspects of rational and integral points on algebraic varieties.

PD Dr. Melissa Penny earned her PhD in applied mathematics at the Queensland University of Technology (Australia) in 2006. Following the PhD she worked as a postdoc and since 2013 as a scientific project leader at Swiss TPH in Basel. In 2017, she habilitated at the University of Basel. Her project is concerned with the mathematical modeling of parasite, drug and vaccine interactions to optimize public health and disease elimination strategies.

Dr. Camilo Perez received his PhD in 2012 from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt (Germany) and currently is a postdoc researcher at ETH Zurich. At Biozentrum, his group will investigate the machinery involved in cell wall biogenesis from Gram-positive pathogenic bacteria, which is a target for the development of novel antibacterial agents.

Dr. Najat Salameh completed her doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in 2009 and then moved to CNRS / Université Paris-Sud (France), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Harvard University (USA). Since 2016, she has been working at the University of Basel’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, where she will conduct a project on MR-guided therapies and artifact-free MR imaging.

The linguist PD Dr. Juliane Schröter is currently a senior assistant at the University of Zurich, where she finished her doctorate in 2010 and habilitated in 2015 in German Linguistics. Her project at the Department of Linguistics and Literature studies the mechanisms of arguing in Swiss politics and which standards and ideals guide the different parties.

Also, the SNSF has accepted the extension of the SNSF professorships of Prof. Luca Martinazzi (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) and Prof. Mike Recher (Department of Biomedicine).

Further information

Prof. Dr. Edwin C. Constable, Vice President for Research, University of Basel, phone: +41 61 207 10 01, email: edwin.constable@unibas.ch