Honours and prizes

Lukas Ballo receives the Carl Pirath Prize 2025 from the Deutsche
Verkehrswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft e. V. (DVWG) for his dissertation
about the E-Bike City project.

The prize for the most promising invention developed at ETH Zurich last year has been awarded to a research team from the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry. The scientists received the Spark Award 2025 for a novel process for converting common global pollutants into industrial raw materials.?

Where antibodies reach their limits in medicine, aptamers step in.?For her pioneering work in developing aptamer-modified biosensors, Nako Nakatsuka, assistant professor at EPFL, has been honored with the 2025 Ruzicka Prize.

BRIDGE, the funding initiative of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Innosuisse, reviewed 108 applications and ultimately approved 15 innovation projects, including Daniel Richard's project (deMello Group).?The project is supported with CHF 2.5 million. The chemist intends to use the funding to develop affordable, portable, and rapid diagnostic technology for tuberculosis.

Torsten Hoefler, Professor at the Department of Computer Science (D-INFK) at ETH Zurich and Chief Architect for AI at CSCS, and his team, together with CSCS engineers, won this year¡¯s Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. ETH Professor Mathieu Luisier (D-ITET) and his team, collaborating with Hoefler and also finalists, received the ACM Honorable Mention.?

This year¡¯s Golden Owl teaching award goes to Johan Gaume, Professor of Alpine Mass Movements at ETH Zurich and SLF Davos. Through hands-on experiments, blackboard derivations and simulations, he brings the physics of granular materials like sand and snow vividly to life. For him, teaching and learning are driven by passion, curiosity and enjoyment.

The adjunct professor of geodynamics is?honoured?by students for his empathetic manner and enormous?expertise.