Board of Governors

Eva Herzog has been a member of the Swiss Council of States for the canton of Basel-Stadt since 2019 and served as its President from December 2023 to December 2024. From 2005 to 2020, she was a member of the cantonal government and head of the Department of Finance of Basel-Stadt, following her earlier role as a member of the Grand Council for the Social Democratic Party (SP) in Basel-Stadt.

She studied History, Economics and Spanish at the Universities of Basel and Santiago de Compostela. Subsequently, she worked as a scientific collaborator in the Vice-Rectorate for Research at the University of Basel and as a cultural manager.

Eva Herzog has been President of the Board of Governors of Swiss TPH since January 2023.

Sabina De Geest is a Professor of Nursing at the University of Basel’s Faculty of Medicine. She is also a part-time Professor of Nursing at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and holds adjunct appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh and New York University.

She leads PIONEER, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on behavioural and psychosocial issues in chronically ill people. Driven by implementation science methodology, her research portfolio focuses on the development of innovative care models, partially powered by eHealth.

In addition, her research addresses psychosocial and behavioural pathways and their relation to chronic illness outcomes, as well as developing and testing of instruments to assess patient-reported outcomes. She is a co-founder of the Swiss Implementation Science Network.

Ariane Bürgin is the Head of Higher Education at the Department of Education of the Canton of Basel-Stadt. Having joined the Department in 1997, she has many years of experience in cantonal administration and in the political management of cantonal and intercantonal negotiation processes within the higher education sector. 

Through her various professional activities, including teaching and consultancy roles in adult education, secondary schools and at the university, she has a broad knowledge of education policy and cross-sectoral expertise.

She studied Philosophy and History in Basel and Berlin and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Basel, as well as a teaching diploma for secondary schools.

Barbara Wieland is the Director of the Institute of Virology and Immunology (IVI), the national reference laboratory for diagnostics and research of highly contagious viral animal diseases and zoonoses in Switzerland. A veterinarian with a PhD in veterinary epidemiology from the University of Bern, she has over 25 years of experience in veterinary epidemiology research with over 100 publications, livestock disease control, and teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

After a post-doc and lectureship at the Pirbright Institute and the Royal Veterinary College in London, she managed animal health projects for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Mongolia and was a principial scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Ethiopia. She held management functions in the CGIAR research programme on Livestock and led the setting up of the CGIAR Antimicrobial Resistance Hub at ILRI in 2019.

François Chappuis is Head of the Division of Tropical and Humanitarian Medicine at the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), which focuses on the prevention and care of international travelers and on the implementation of operational and research projects in several African and Asian countries. Since 2018, he also heads HUG's Department of Primary Care. 

He is a medical doctor specialised in internal medicine and travel and tropical medicine. He holds a master's degree in clinical tropical medicine from the University of Mahidol in Thailand and a PhD in medical sciences from the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

He has worked for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as a field doctor in East Africa and as a medical adviser for neglected tropical disease (NTD) programmes in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Kenya. His teaching and research activities focus on NTDs, particularly sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, kala-azar and snakebite envenoming.

Lutz Hegemann is the President of Global Health and Swiss Country Affairs at Novartis. The unit focuses on transforming healthcare in low- and middle-income countries, with programmes targeting malaria, neglected tropical diseases and non-communicable diseases. He also oversees the company’s presence in sub-Saharan Africa. He represents the company both in Switzerland and internationally, building strategic partnerships across public and private sectors to advance inclusive global health innovation.

He began his career as a public health physician and scientist. Since joining Novartis in 2005, he has held roles of increasing responsibility. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine & Hygiene and serves on the boards of various organisations focused on human health. Since January 2023, he has been a member of the Board of Governors of Swiss TPH.

Jacques Fellay heads the “Human Genomics of Infection and Immunity” research laboratory at the EPFL School of Life Sciences. He is also Head of Precision Medicine at the University Hospital (CHUV) in Lausanne, Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Faculty member at the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH), and Chief Scientist at the Health2030 Genome Center at Campus Biotech in Geneva.

He is a medical doctor and researcher with expertise in genomics, infectious diseases, and personalised health. At EPFL, his group investigates the role of human genetic variation in the host-pathogen battle, aiming to shed new light on basic biological mechanisms and pave the way for more personalised approaches to health. At CHUV, he demonstrates the clinical utility of genome-based approaches in medicine and promotes dialogue between science and society.

He served as a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force and has received multiple awards, including the National Latsis Prize in 2012.

Rolf Borner has headed the Infrastructure & Operations Directorate in the Rectorate of the University of Basel since August 2021. The Directorate is responsible for maintaining the University's infrastructure and developing it in line with requirements.

He studied Building Engineering at the ETH Zurich, where he obtained his PhD in 2004 in the field of building management. From 2005, he worked in the real estate division of the Finance Department of the canton of Basel-Stadt, and from July 2015 he was Managing Director of Immobilien Basel-Stadt. 

In February 2019, the Basel government appointed him as co-head of the Real Estate Board of the University of Basel. In this role, he was significantly involved in the development of the new agreement on real estate at the University of Basel.

Alban Frei is Head of Higher Education in the Directorate of Education, Culture and Sport of the canton of Basel-Landschaft. He studied History, Geography and German at the University of Basel and then worked at the Universities of Zurich and Luxembourg. Since 2012, he has been a researcher at ETH Zurich, where he obtained his PhD with a thesis on research policy and life sciences.

He was the managing director of a cooperation project in the field of digital research infrastructures. Since 2020, he has been responsible for research management training at the University of Bern, developing the leadership training programme “Academic Leadership - Leading at Higher Education Institutions”.

As Head of Higher Education, he is responsible for all cantonal higher education policy dossiers, including the bi- and multi-cantonal agreements for the University of Basel, the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland FHNW and Swiss TPH.

Deborah Studer is a scientific advisor in the National Research Division at the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI, where her responsibilities include research institutions of national importance, European research infrastructure networks and various strategic projects in the field of health.

Before joining SERI, she coordinated the special programme for clinical research IICT at the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Deborah Studer studied Biochemistry at the EPFL and at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. After completing her doctorate in Biomedicine at ETH Zurich, she conducted research in the field of cardiovascular diseases at the University of Calgary in Canada.

Jürg Utzinger is the Director of Swiss TPH and Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Basel. He holds an MSc in Environmental Science, a PhD in Epidemiology and pursued several years of postdoctoral research in demography and epidemiology at Princeton University in the USA.

His research, teaching and training interests pertain to the epidemiology and integrated control of neglected tropical diseases and health impact assessments of large footprint projects in low- and middle-income countries. He is engaged in trans-national global health research consortia with ongoing projects in China, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa and Tanzania.

He is the President of the R. Geigy Foundation, a member of the Board of Directors of the Swiss Centre for Scientific Research (CSRS), and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM).