UZH Mentoring Award – Awardees 2021

Our call for nominations was answered by 90 young researchers from seven faculties. The nominations were submitted to us along with personal video messages in addition to the required documents.

Out of 49 nominated professors, GRC awarded the following three winners in 2021:

Martin Kleinmann’s mentoring concept is characterized by family-friendliness and with a strong focus on acquiring and using different skills. His mentees also take on mentoring work themselves. He regularly invites experts to support his mentees and promotes stays abroad. In addition to technical knowledge, he focuses on open-science practices, how to deal with setbacks, and building leadership skills. In 2017, he initiated a project to take a closer look at leadership skills and social skills in appointment procedures for professorships at UZH. As director of his department, he achieved that all qualification positions are filled with at least 70% and he initiated workshops, congresses and summer schools on a local to international level. All doctoral students supervised by Martin Kleinmann have achieved their qualification goal and seven of them were able to successfully transfer to a professorship.

As the former Vice Dean Careers of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Katharina Maag Merki ensured that all institutes have developed a career concept. She has also been involved in the development of the concept at her own institute. In particular, she conducts regular career and counseling interviews with her mentees, provides low-threshold points of contact, and integrates outstanding students early on as academic assistants. Furthermore, she supports her mentees in scientific networking and raises awareness of university policy issues such as women in science or open access. Katharina Maag Merki is committed to an atmosphere of trust, appreciation, transparency and openness and takes into account the individual needs of her mentees, such as their family situation.

David Seidl focuses on quality rather than quantity in his mentoring. In doing this, he ensures that he is available to the junior researchers he mentors with the necessary intensity and time flexibility. This results in an excellent track record: his mentees are pursuing successful scientific careers. At the same time, he takes care to maintain a healthy work-life balance, especially taking into account his mentees' family plans. Over the years, he has continuously studied various mentoring concepts in depth and exchanges ideas with colleagues at UZH and abroad about their mentoring experiences. In addition, David Seidl supports his mentees in building an individual mentoring network consisting of international researchers with different strengths.

The following professors were nominated by junior researchers for the UZH Mentoring Award 2021 (in alphabetical order):

Ulrike Babusiaux, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Georg Bauer, Mike Oliver Becker, Nicole Borel, Christina Boyle, Johan Chang, Burcu Demiray, Alexander Dumoulin, Christa Dürscheid, André Euler, Damien Farine, Jörg Frey, Sean Froese, Andrea Giuffredi-Kähr, Emmanuella Guenova, Michel Habib, Silja Häusermann, Ravit Helled, David Hémous, Alexis Hervais-Adelman, Michèle Hubli, Christian Huggel, Marianne Hundt, Roger Kouyos, Felix Kübler, Beatrix Latal, Anne Meylan, Sebastian Olbrich, Milo Puhan, Nora Maria Raschle, Sabine Rohrmann, Katja Rost, Ludwig Rübekeil, Christoph Rüegger, Mike Schäfer, Ana Stankovic, Silke Stertz, Brigitte Tag, Marc Thommen, Philippe Tobler, Paulina Wawrzyniak, Ulrike Weber-Stadlbauer, Michael Zemp