Joël Mesot resigns from a third term as President of ETH Zurich

(CONNECT) Joël Mesot has decided not to run for a third term as President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The President, who has been in office since January 2019, addressed the ETH Board at its meeting on 5. and 6 March that he intends to pass on the baton at the end of his second term of office at the end of 2026, writes the ETH Domain Council in a statement. "But until then, there is still a lot to tackle and complete," Mesot is quoted as saying. The outgoing President of the university has been a member of the ETH Board since 2010. Mesot was at the helm of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) from 2010 to 2018.

At Mesot's request, the ETH Board appointed Annette Oxenius as a new member of the Executive Board of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich at its meeting. She will replace Christan Wolfrum as Vice President for Research at the beginning of August. Wolfrum joins Nanyang Technological University NTU Singapore as Deputy President & Provost. Her successor Oxenius has been a full professor of immunology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich since 2012.

At its meeting, the ETH Board also allocated the federal funds for 2026 and a supplement for 2025. On the one hand, the supplementary allocation serves to partially compensate for a one-off budget cut in 2025. Further funds will also flow into the Swiss Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiative. Most of the federal funding for 2026 will go to the two Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne and the four research institutes PSI, the Swiss  Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and the Water Institute Eawag. ce/hs