Tanja Stadler receives Rössler Prize
Mathematician and biostatistician Tanja Stadler receives this year’s Rössler Prize for her scientific achievements. Worth 200,000 Swiss francs, it is ETH Zurich’s most generous research award.
Tanja Stadler explains her area of research using a tree as an illustration. During reproduction, genetic information changes – branching out like the boughs of a tree. “I answer biological questions by reconstructing the tree from genetic sequences and then calculating the biological processes from that,” she says. She skilfully explains how this approach is applicable to all areas of biology. She elaborates with particularly illustrative examples, including viruses that mutate, cancer cells that proliferate and ecosystems that evolve through time. Today, Stadler has a rather esteemed audience – patron of the sciences Max Rössler is visiting her laboratory at the ETH Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel.
Every year, Rössler endows a prize for young ETH researchers who achieve extraordinary things and would like to expand their research group even further. The Rössler Prize will be awarded for the 14th time this year. “When I look at the list of colleagues who have received this award in the past, it fills me with pride. It is an honour, and a very generous donation from someone who supports science out of their own pocket because of personal conviction,” Stadler says.
This visit is special for a couple of reasons: not only is this the first time the Rössler Prize has gone to the Department of Biosystems, but it is also the first time it has gone to a mathematician. A native of St. Gallen, Max Rössler himself studied mathematics at ETH Zurich and received his doctorate in 1966 for his work on orbital calculations in space travel. After a spell as guest researcher at Harvard University, he returned to ETH, where he was a senior scientist and lecturer at the Institute of Operations Research from 1967 to 1978. Stadler therefore seizes the opportunity to show Rössler a few formulas. “It’s not every day that someone is also interested in the statistics behind our research,” she says with a grin.
Stadler is alluding here to her tenure as president of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, which is became known during the pandemic. In this role, she was in the spotlight almost around the clock, aiming to contextualise the latest scientific findings for policymakers and the public. However, Stadler is not receiving the prize for her great commitment to the task force, but for her outstanding scientific achievements, as the ETH prize committee emphasises.
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Learn about the Computational Evolution group led by Tanja Stadler.
Find information on the external page Rössler Prize.