Julia Vorholt new Director of Studies at the D-BIOL
As per 1 September 2020, Prof. Julia Vorholt succeeds Prof. Frédéric Allain as Director of Studies in Biology. She is the initiator and driving force behind a fundamentally redesigned biology study programme that will start in a little less than two weeks at ETH Zurich. This makes her the perfect choice for this task and for the further development of the curriculum.
The unique study programme is newly oriented towards the development of life. Evolution as the narrative allows the subject matter to be structured in such a way that more general principles and connections are revealed and less isolated factual knowledge is imparted, as is common in traditional curriculum setups.
Julia Vorholt studied biology at the Universities of Bonn and Marburg, Germany. After her PhD she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Seattle, USA, and then as a group leader in Toulouse, France. In 2006, her scientific career led her to ETH Zurich. She is a Full Professor at the Institute of Microbiology of ETH Zurich.
With her group, Julia Vorholt investigates how the environment shapes bacterial physiology, with an emphasis on metabolism, novel protein function and microbial interactions. She applies meta-omics analyses to bacterial communities and uses synthetic microbial communities to study microbe-microbe-plant interactions. In addition, she develops Fluidic Force Microscopy for single cell manipulation and analyses. She received the Otto-Hahn medal of the Max-Planck Society, is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and received two ERC Advanced Grants, in 2015 and 2020.
Link to the website of the Vorholt group.