Endowed Professorships
Funding that brings top minds to Zurich
The founding of The LOOP Zurich included two endowed professorships in biomedical informatics. They were made possible by the Horten Health Foundation, formerly the Helmut Horten Foundation. The foundation gave CHF 10 million each to the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich so that both universities could set up a chair in this field.
The two professorships are meant to strengthen biomedical informatics in Zurich and anchor it for the long term. They connect data, computer science and medicine, which helps new research findings reach clinical practice faster. This makes them a key part of precision medicine, which should benefit patients directly.
Below, we introduce the two professors and their research.
Prof. Dr. Bjoern Menze
Full Professor of Biomedical Image Analysis and Machine Learning, Helmut Horten Foundation
Appointed: September 1, 2020
Curriculum Vitae
Prof. Menze studied physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Uppsala and earned his doctorate in Heidelberg in 2007. He then held postdoctoral positions at several renowned research institutions, including Harvard Medical School in Boston, Centre Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée (France), and MIT in Cambridge. From 2011, he also worked at ETH Zurich. In 2013, Prof. Menze was appointed to a W2 professorship at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where, since 2019, he has conducted research and taught as W3 Professor of Image-Based Biomedical Modeling at the Munich School of BioEngineering and the Center for Translational Cancer Research.
Prof. Dr. Pedro Beltrao
Associate Professor of Computational Systems Biology in the Department of Biology, made possible by the Helmut Horten Foundation
Appointed: January 1, 2022
Curriculum Vitae
Prof. Beltrao studied biology at the University of Aveiro and conducted research at EMBL Heidelberg; he earned his doctorate in Aveiro in 2007. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 2013, he has led a group at the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Hinxton, UK. In 2015, he received an ERC Starting Grant. His research focuses on the cellular consequences of genetic variation.