Michael Hengartner
Michael Otmar Hengartner (born 5 June 1966 in St. Gallen) is a Swiss-Canadian biochemist and molecular biologist. From February 2020 he has been president of the ETH Board. Before that he was the president of the University of Zurich and president of the Swiss Rectors' Conference, swissuniversities. Bibliography. Hengartner was born in 1966, the son of a Swiss mathematics professor. The family moved first to Paris, later to Bloomington, Indiana and then to Quebec City, where he grew up. He studied biochemistry at the Université Laval in Quebec, and graduated with a B.S. in 1988. He received  a doctorate in 1994 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under H. Robert Horvitz. He then led a research group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1997, he co-founded the biotech company Devgen. In 2001, he was appointed to the newly established Ernst Hadorn Endowed Professorship at the Institute of Molecular Biology of the University of Zurich. In 2008, he co-founded the scientific consultancy company Evaluescience. From 2009 to 2014, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Zurich; and from 2014 to 2019, rector of the University of Zurich . Since 2019, he has been director of the ETH Board and since 2009, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Hengartner is married to biologist Denise Hengartner. The couple has six children. Research interests. Hengartner is researching the molecular basis of apoptosis. He uses especially the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as molecular organism. He is also investigating mechanisms of cancer, Alzheimer's and geriatric diseases.