New fellowships 2026
The digital transformation needs new ideas – this is where “ZHAW digital” comes in: for the eighth time, the initiative is funding innovative research projects from across the university. In 2026, five juniors, three seniors, and five seniors with PhDs from a total of five departments will receive funding.
This year, the fellows are tackling a wide range of topics – from smart cities to robotics and artificial intelligence to multimodal behavior analysis. In the health sector, the focus is on biotechnology and medical technology, digital health, and genomics. At the same time, topics related to the digital society are coming to the fore: digital discourse and social research, open science, governance transparency, and digital markets and competition.
These projects are funded by “ZHAW digital” – an initiative that aims to sustainably anchor innovation, research, and collaboration in the digital space. It combines three interrelated priorities: promoting education, promoting research, and the digital development of the ZHAW. In the field of research, the Digital Futures Fund for Research supports specific projects, while fellowships specifically strengthen individuals, create visibility, and promote university-wide networking.
The fellows and their projects
- Bettina Sommer (Health Sciences) uses wearable sensors to shift gait analysis for multiple sclerosis from the clinic to everyday life, thus enabling a more realistic picture of disease progression.
- People with speech disorders face other problems: AI applications are often inaccessible to them. Mark Cieliebak (SoE) is therefore developing fault-tolerant speech recognition and error diagnostics for Swiss German.
- Jorge Peña Queralta (SoE) is bringing AI research into concrete assistance systems: he is developing human-centered learning methods for assistance robots so that people with limited mobility can be supported safely and confidently.
- How powerful AI is in the healthcare context, Manuel Gil (LSFM) also demonstrates, using it to precisely decode evolutionary changes in protein structures and make them usable in biomedicine.
- Theo Smits (LSFM) deals with health risks of a completely different kind: he analyzes the genomes of bacteria to systematically record antibiotic resistance.
- Moving away from biological risks to social dynamics in the digital space: Elena Gavagnin (SML) uses multimodal AI to investigate how strangers communicate and act under stress in online multiplayer games.
- From isolated to public communication – Dolores Lemmenmeier (linguistics) is developing an AI application for the Swiss text corpus Swiss-AL that uses data to show how public debates are conducted in a transparent manner.
- Mental health is also discussed digitally. Dario D'Agostino (linguistics) is working with a peer organization to examine how the topic is discussed on social media and to show how this can be done more responsibly.
- Chantal Wright (linguistics) is taking responsibility for multilingual open science. Because many scientific translations remain invisible, she wants to work with Swiss libraries to make these texts easier to find.
- Also focusing on transparency is Siyana Gurova (SML): She shows how institutional investors vote on shareholder decisions and what reasons they give for doing so – thus making fiduciary responsibility comprehensible in practice.
- Andreas Hefti (SML) is also investigating how structures influence decisions: he wants to know how information filters shape perception, competition, and market efficiency.
- From digital markets to urban infrastructure: Jenny Rocio Rios Martinez (SoE) assesses how resilient critical systems in cities are to disruptions and provides strategies for avoiding failures.
- Finally, Pasquale Cirillo (SML) takes urban resilience a step further by using sensor data from urban systems in “Zurich's AURA” to provide early warnings of impending failures in electricity, traffic, or energy supply.
More information about current and previous fellows can be found here.