Viola Vogel

Viola Vogel
Born1959 (age 64–65)
CitizenshipGermany Germany
EducationMax Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry
Awards Philip Morris Research Award (2005)
Julius Springer Award (2006)
NAE Member (2020)
NAS Member (2021)
Scientific career
Fieldsbiophysics
bioengineering
Institutions University of Washington (1990-2003)
ETH Zürich (2004-)
Doctoral advisorHans Kuhn

Viola Vogel, also known as Viola Vogel-Scheidemann, (born 1959 in Tübingen, West Germany) is a German biophysicist and bioengineer. She is a professor at ETH Zürich, where she is head of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology and leads the Applied Mechanobiology Laboratory.[1]

Biography

[edit]

Vogel was born in 1959 in the university town of Tübingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, then West Germany. In 1988 she won an Otto Hahn Medal for her doctoral work with Hans Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen. In 1990, after two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, she took a faculty position in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle where she initiated the molecular bioengineering program. She was subsequently founding director of the Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Washington (1997-2003). In 2004 she relocated to ETH Zürich in Switzerland, first as a professor in the Department of Material Sciences, and later as a founding member of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (2012). She has been a faculty member of the Wyss Translational Center in Zürich since it began in 2015.[1] Since 2018 she has been an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health [de].[2]

In 2020, Vogel was appointed by European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel to serve on an independent search committee for the next president of the European Research Council (ERC), chaired by Helga Nowotny.[3]

Research

[edit]

The direction of Vogel's work is to take microscopic pieces of living tissue and investigate their mechanical properties, with a view to developing new technologies. Her interests include molecular self-assembly, cell adhesion, and the construction of biological minerals, materials, and tissues.[4] Her experimental and computational discoveries of how stretching proteins changes their function, and how cells sense and respond to force, have applications in stem cell differentiation, tissue growth and regeneration, angiogenesis, and cancer.[1]

Awards

[edit]

Vogel won a Philip Morris Research Award [de] in 2005[5] and shared the Julius Springer Award [de] for Applied Physics in 2006.[6] She was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2018,[7] member of US National Academy of Engineering in 2020 and US National Academy of Sciences in 2021. [8][9] She was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2023.[10]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c "Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. Viola Vogel". Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. Viola Vogel – Laboratory of Applied Mechanobiology. 1 February 2018. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  2. ^ Health, Berlin Institute of. "Viola Vogel". Einstein Foundation Berlin. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  3. ^ Commission appoints independent Search Committee and invites nominations and applications to fill the post of the next President of the European Research Council European Commission, press release of October 9, 2020.
  4. ^ Hess, Reinhard (1 February 2009). "Prof. Viola Vogel". nanomat.mat.ethz.ch. Archived from the original on 28 February 2009. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  5. ^ "Philip-Morris-Forschungspreise 2005 vergeben" [2005 Philip Morris Research Awards]. ORF ON Science (in German). Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  6. ^ "Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics". springer.com. 1 February 2018. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  7. ^ "List of Members". Leopoldina. 1 June 2018. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  8. ^ "Professor Viola Vogel".
  9. ^ "Viola Vogel".
  10. ^ "Royal Academy of Engineering welcomes 73 new Fellows". Retrieved 20 September 2023.