Long-Term Research Funding

The TRANSFORM funding program aims to promote new organizational structures in pioneering areas of research. These structures will be generally interdisciplinary in nature. One of the eligibility criteria for projects is that they continue to be funded by income streams in the relevant faculties once their central seed funding has been exhausted. This ensures that they are set up for the long term.

Three projects will receive TRANSFORM funding over the next four years. A new Department of Archaeology, Classical Philology and Classical Studies (IAKA) at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences will receive CHF 1.8 million, while the new inter-faculty Center for Research Synthesis will receive CHF 1 million. In medicine, a new Center for Engineered Immunotherapy will make it easier to translate research findings into clinical use. The center has been allocated CHF 0.75 million up to 2029 for this work.

As part of its mission, the IAKA is to use the latest technologies to explore the world of the Greeks, Romans and other early cultures. The Department of Archaeology and the Department of Greek and Latin Philology will be merged to create the planned new department, which will work closely with the three chairs in ancient history at the Department of History.

Three further tenure-track assistant professorships are planned for the new department alongside the existing chairs. These will help to raise awareness of the subjects the IAKA covers. One of these new professorships is intended to research the people and environment of the ancient world. Archaeology professor Corinna Reinhard, who is instrumental in setting up the department, explains that looking at developments in societies of the past can help us to better understand developments today. “By taking a methodologically well-founded scientific perspective, we can try to reconstruct what happened,” she says. One example might be societies’ resilience to natural disasters, and what factors play a role in this.

Felix K. Maier holds the Chair of Ancient History and will in future work closely with the IAKA while remaining based in the Department of History. Both he and Corinna Reinhard already make intensive use of digital methodologies, such as AI and 3D visualizations, in their research. The IAKA will provide a setting in which to expand and advance these methodologies. A dedicated senior teaching and research assistant position will be created specifically to promote early-career academics in this emerging field.

“What sets the department apart both nationally and internationally is that we will be exploring new and unconventional research pathways,” Maier explains. He is not referring only to collaboration between disciplines such as classical archaeology, ancient history and classical philology, which is very much the Anglo-Saxon tradition. “We will be working hand in hand with disciplines such as computational linguistics, psychology, geology and climate science,” he continues. In his Re-Experiencing History research project, for example, he collaborates with computational linguists and uses generative AI to visualize historical scenes as images or short video sequences. “If we have actual pictures of historical scenes, our brains conjure up a whole new set of ideas and questions. And that’s extremely useful for us.”

Founded in 2018, the UZH Center for Reproducible Science (CRS) has long focused on scientific quality, and with it the credibility and reliability of scientific findings. The CRS will now continue as an integral part of a new Center for Research Synthesis. “We want to bring together the two areas of reproducibility and research synthesis,” explains Leonhard Held, professor of biostatistics at UZH and founding director of the CRS.

Both approaches are important in evaluating the quality and validity of scientific findings. Research syntheses collate and combine existing studies to assess and categorize the status of research in a given field. However, to date researchers have often lacked ways of linking scientific findings at all, says CRS managing director Fabio Molo. “That’s especially true where individual studies use different types of data or varying methodologies.”

Nowadays underlying data is increasingly being published alongside the final studies. This presents new opportunities to compare and combine those studies. “Instead of just collating and evaluating study findings, as in a classic meta-analysis, we can go straight back to the raw data,” Leo Held points out. Research at the new center is intended to develop methods that will permit analysis across heterogeneous raw data. One example is individual patient data meta-analysis in medicine, which draws directly on underlying patient data to synthesize findings.

A second area of emphasis at the center is research into methods that permit the validity or reproducibility of the findings of individual studies to be assessed more effectively. “We have to be better able to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Held states. Enormous pressure to publish is resulting in the release of increasing numbers of studies of dubious scholarly value around the world. “We want to develop a method for assessing the quality of academic evidence more thoroughly,” says Molo.

The goal is for this approach to benefit all interested researchers at UZH. Although the new center is based within the Faculty of Medicine, the issue is “truly interdisciplinary,” as Held underlines. “Often, the same methods are used regardless of the subject area, so the individual disciplines can learn from each other’s experience.” The courses that CRS already runs for junior researchers in all disciplines will continue through the new center.

Immunotherapy is a highly promising approach to combat a whole variety of conditions efficiently, from cancer to auto-immune diseases. It covers a range of methods that use the body’s own immune system to fight tumors in a way that it would not naturally be able to do efficiently enough. “UZH is really well positioned in research into immunotherapy,” says Markus Manz, professor of hematology at UZH and Director of the Department of Medical Oncology and Hematology at the University Hospital Zurich. “But we are limited when it comes to translating progress in the lab into clinical studies.”

The new Center for Engineered Immunotherapy (CEI), endowed with an assistant professorship, should solve this issue. It is being set up specifically to translate research findings into applicable therapies. “A lot of preparatory work has to be done before a discovery in the lab can progress to an initial clinical study,” Manz explains. The professorship aims to ensure that the necessary resources are available. According to Manz, the objective is to “lay a reliable and well standardized path that we can follow to take new therapeutic approaches to the patient's bedside more easily.”

Alongside the objectives described above, the CEI will bundle multiple UZH research activities on immunotherapy and improve knowledge-sharing between researchers. In many cases, technologies developed for one illness can also be applied in completely different areas. “For example, we have found that individual therapies developed in cancer research are extremely efficient in the treatment of certain auto-immune diseases,” Manz goes on. The CEI will establish structures that enable this potential to be identified and used more fully.

Research at the CEI will concentrate on a range of immunological methods to combat tumors. On one track, immune cells such as T-cells will be modified genetically to recognize cancer cells via receptors. If that immune cell comes into contact with tumor cells, it can cause them to die off. CEI research is aimed at making the methods for genetically modifying cells in the lab less time-consuming and expensive. In the best-case scenario this will happen in the patients’ bodies themselves.

In addition, the CEI will develop and investigate new molecules that can work inside the patient, activating immune cells effectively to fight cancer. These molecules work without the need to genetically modify immune cells, which has the potential to make therapies more effective, safer and available to more patients in the long term.