Pioneer in bioinformatics receives ETH Honorary doctorate
On 20 November, ETH Zurich celebrated its 166th ETH Day, its academic holiday, together with guests from research, politics, and industry. Upon the proposal of D-BSSE, Daniel Müller, Head of the Department, presented this year’s ETH Honorary doctorate to Aviv Regev, Professor of Biology at MIT (Cambridge, MA, USA) and Executive Vice-President & Global Head, Genentech Research and Early Development. She is a pioneer in the computational genome analysis of individual cells.
Prof. Dr. Aviv Regev
Executive Vice President & Global Head, Genentech Research and Early Development
receives the 2021 Honorary doctor of ETH Zurich for the invention of groundbreaking experimental and bioinformatics procedures for researching cellular systems.
Molecular processes control gene expression in the cell and determine cell health and tissue formation. As such, the key to treating diseases lies in understanding biological networks. This is something Aviv Regev recognised early on. She is a pioneer in the computational genome analysis of individual cells, which searches for patterns that can be attributed to certain symptoms or disorders. Aviv Regev is Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and Founding Director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute (MIT/Harvard University). She became Head of Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche, in 2020. Based in San Francisco, the company was also quick to realise the huge potential of biological data analysis for the treatment of diseases and in particular for personalised medicine. On top of this, the dual citizen of Israel and the United States has chaired the Human Cell Atlas, an international programme for mapping the full variety of human cells, since 2016.
Find information on ETH Day 2021.
Read about Professor Aviv Regev, the newly appointed Honorary doctor.
Watch the external pagecelebration, the honorific speech starts on min 02:10:50.