News & Events

Call for papers is open.

On Wednesday, April 24, Kyriaki Papageorgiou (Trondheim) will give the talk "AI and the Future of Academic Work: Reimagining Bacon's New Atlantis" at the Science Studies Colloquium.

30^th of May - 31^st of May, 2024 at ETH Zürich

On 25^th & 26^th of April 2024

A forum for ETH researchers across disciplines studying democracy in the digital age. Join us on April 25, 2024

This examination of the evolving landscape of European security cooperation with Indo-Pacific partners includes a discussion of the key drivers of cooperation and the different types of relations between actors. Critical questions remain about the buy-in and benefit of these ambitions for all involved.

Nuclear risk reduction has emerged as a promising strategy to mitigate the risks posed by nuclear weapons in a security environment marked by increasing nuclear competition and threats. Concrete measures remain difficult to implement, however, given different understandings of risk, the interconnectedness of conventional and strategic risks, and the manipulation of risks as a conflict tool.

The results of the third representative survey of the ETH Swiss Panel Global Cooperation 2023 are in. More than 4,000 Swiss residents shared their views on global poverty, and on Switzerland’s funding and allocation of development cooperation.

On Wednesday, April 10, Christophe Bonneuil (Paris) will give the talk "The Historian and the Planet. Regimes of Planetarity in a Longue Durée Perspective" at the Science Studies Colloquium. The event will be jointly hosted by the UZH Chair of the History of the Anthropocene (Debjani Bhattacharyya).

Global pessimism meets desire for an operational army.

Dr Christian Freudlsperger has been named Assistant Professor of Multilevel Politics. Professor Livia Schubiger has been appointed Full Professor of International Relations and Data Science https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/03/new-appointments-at-eth-zurich.html

We welcome two new PhD researchers, Lingxi Tang and Alyssa Gunnemann, who joined the EPG and CFP groups in March 2024.

We are thrilled to congratulate Marion Meyers, a 2023 ISTP MSc graduate, for being selected as the winner of the 2024 GAIA Masters Student Paper Award for her thesis on machine learning and degrowth.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent targeted attacks on critical infrastructure (CI) have put the country and its population under immense pressure. However, Russian interference with Ukrainian CI did not begin in 2022 but goes back at least as far as 2014 and the events surrounding the annexation of Crimea.

The new ETH Policy Fellowship aims to foster greater understanding between government and the academic world. Regina Witter from the Federal Office for Spatial Development was among the first cohort to take part.

"Human Rights, AI Models, and the Quest for Pluralism" by Prof. Dr. Iris Eisenberger on March 14, 2024 at 18:15 in RZ F 21.

This report represents the third installment in a series focused on identifying and analyzing trends significant for civil protection in Switzerland. It provides insights into trends expected to significantly impact the nation's civil protection system within the next five to ten years. Initiated by the Federal Office of Civil Protection (FOCP), this report aims to enhance horizon scanning capabilities within civil protection, a field necessitating ongoing adaptation. 

Meet Andreas Felderer, a recent graduate of the STP MSc program. He began his studies in the Autumn 2020, minoring in Data and Computer Science. Before beginning his Master’s, he completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the Technical University of Munich. He previously attended an add-on study program in technology management and did an internship with Munich Re in the R&D department focusing on natural language processing.

At its meeting of 6 and 7 March 2024 and upon application of Joël Mesot, President of ETH Zurich, the ETH Board appointed nine professors. The Board also awarded the title of "Professor" three times and the title of "Professor of Practice" once.

We are pleased to announce that Max Morel has joined NADEL as a Senior Lecturer, focusing on humanitarian aid and media for global sustainable development.

A free, open, and international research and education environment is essential to scientific progress. At the same time, geopolitical tensions pose new challenges to the science, technology, and innovation sector. In many Western countries, approaches to knowledge security are being developed to protect core scientific values and preserve national interests.

Through export controls and industrial policy packages, the global semiconductor industry has become an arena of technological competition in recent years. As states seek to “de-risk” critical supply chains further, they face difficult challenges in identifying national security risks from emerging dual-use technologies and making tradeoffs between economic and security considerations.

On Wednesday, March 20, Dora Vargha (Berlin) will give the talk "Social or Socialist? Ideas of Health, Society and Biomedicine Across the Iron Curtain" at the Science Studies Colloquium.

In the new vlog of the ETH Zurich Center for Law & Economics, Prof. Christoph Engel (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn) and Prof. Stefan Bechtold (ETH Zurich) discuss Engel's recent study "The German Constitutional Court – Political, but not Partisan?".

We welcome Darius Sultani as a visiting researcher at EPG/CFP for the month of March 2024.

Katrin Sievert has published a research paper proposing a new method for projecting the future costs of DAC technologies.

The cost of removing large quantities of CO₂ from the air will fall in the medium term, but not as much as previously hoped. This is the conclusion reached by ETH researchers on the basis of new calculations. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions should therefore continue at pace, says the research team.

Together with Prof. Tatjana Kleele (ETHZ, D-BIOL), Gerhard Schratt received 200,000 USD to study the regulation of mitochondria, the power houses of our cells, by microRNAs in human neurons and the potential relevance for neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers. After the 18-month pilot phase, selected projects will be eligible for a four year follow-up funding (1.6 Mio USD total).

SNF-SPARK grant (97’000 CHF) awarded for Jochen Winterer, Oberassistent in the Schratt lab, to investigate the role of experience-regulated miRNAs in parvalbumin positive interneurons. Results are expected to shed light onto mechanisms by which parvalbumin positive interneurons modulate the dynamics of neuronal assemblies.

David Zollikofer, research assistant of Prof. Elliott Ash at the ETH Zurich Center for Law & Economics, and Ben Zimmerman from the University of Colorado Boulder have won the AI Safety Prize at the Swiss Cyber Security Days.

Next Wednesday, February 28, Matthias Leese, Assistant Professor for Technology and Governance at ISTP, will kick off the Science Studies Colloquium in the spring semester 2024. He will give the talk "De-scribing Crime: Making and Unmaking Documents in Police Work".

Join us on 7 March 2024 for a documentary film screening and panel discussion about Switzerland and Bangladesh.

Starts on February 28, 2024

From January 1, 2024, InvigoratEU - a new Horizon Europe project coordinated by the EU-Chair at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together with the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) in Berlin - will examine how the EU can structure its future relations with its eastern neighbours and the countries of the Western Balkans.

by Sheila Jasanoff on Friday, March 15, 2024

Vally Koubi is Professor (Titular) and Senior Scientist at the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) at the ETH Zurich and Professor at the Institute of Economics at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She was formerly the Director of CIS from 2020 - 2022. She will take over as interim Director of Studies at the MACIS Programme from 1 February 2024  to 31 January 2025, while Prof. Dr. Dominik Hangartner is on leave.

In February 2024, EPG and CFP researchers spent a two-day winter retreat in the mountains. Besides talks and presentations on ongoing research the WIDE session for well-being as a doctoral/postdoc student was included.

With Beate Rössler, Adam Knowles, Franci Mangraviti, Martin Seel, Silvia de Toffoli and Nadja Germann

Nadia Mazouz will give a lecture on 24.04.2024 as part of the "Ethics and Political Philosophy Colloquium" of the Chair of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the University of Freiburg

With the lecture "Paradoxes in Democracy and Liberalism" by Nadia Mazouz on February 16, 2024

- Andreas Wenger (ETH) from the CSS was awarded the Golden Owl, given by the ETH Student's Association. - Elliot Ash (ETH) was promoted to Associate Professor of Law, Economics and Data Science. - Silja Haüsermann (UZH) was awarded the Schader Prize 2024, honoring social scientists who have made a contribution to solving social problems. - and Daniele Caramani (UZH) through his association with the European University Institute will start an ERC project on global politics.

Leveraging open-access satellite images with deep learning can help humanitarian and human rights organizations address violent conflicts more rapidly. To ensure the effectiveness of remote monitoring, organizations need to align their strategies with the technical constraints of deep learning-based monitoring systems.

At the core of every conflict lies a paradox: political elites claim to be acting on behalf of the people, but violence means that measuring public opinion is incredibly challenging. This is evident today in Ukraine. Given the challenges posed by Russia’s war in Ukraine, how reliable are wartime polls?

Kathrin Durizzo will soon start her new position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she will conduct research on more equitable and accessible health care for all.

"Sternstunde Philosophie" from 20^th January 2024 with Michael Hagner on Paul Feyerabend

Sara Booz will no longer work for the Chair for Science Studies from 31 January 2024.

We are pleased to publish the program of the Science Studies Colloquium in the spring semester 2024.

Researchers from the ETH Development Economics Group examined the legalisation of illicit financial flows (IFFs) in the gold trade.

Join us as we explore Yilin Huang's master's thesis journey, where her passion for technology, environment, and policymaking converge. To understand how community participation and policy decisions interact in a real-world environment, Yilin’s thesis focuses on landscape decision-making in rural Laos, where she spent two months during the summer of 2023.