Viola Vogel
ETH Zurich
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Primary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Secondary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Viola Vogel’s research in Bioengineering focuses on how to exploit emerging knowledge in Mechanobiology for Applications in Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine or to treat inflammatory diseases. With experimental and computational tools, she discovered various structural mechanisms how cells sense mechanical forces and convert them into biochemical signals, ultimately altering molecular transcription processes. She graduated with a PhD in Physics from the University of Frankfurt (1987) with research conducted at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, for which she received the Otto-Hahn Medal. After her postdoctoral studies in Physics at UC Berkeley, she started her academic career at the University of Washington Seattle in Bioengineering (1990-2004), where she was the founding Director of the Center for Nanotechnology (1997-2003). When moving to ETH Zurich in 2004, she initially joined the Department of Materials and received an ERC Advanced Grant (2009). She then co-founded the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (2012) and chaired the Department from 2018-2020. She is currently Einstein Fellow at the Charité Berlin and Elected Member of the Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and of both the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). She received an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Tampere University, Finland 2012.
Research Interests
Viola Vogel’s research in Bioengineering focuses on how to exploit emerging knowledge in Mechanobiology for Applications in Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine or to treat inflammatory diseases. Mechanical forces drive essential life processes, from the first steps in fertilization all the way to shaping growing assemblies of cells into organisms. Reciprocal mechanical signaling between cells and their environment is key to the spatio-temporal coordination of tissue growth and regenerative processes, and if miss-balanced can tip the niche towards pathological transformations. Even though most of our knowledge in Biology, Medicine and Pharmacy is rooted in the structure-function relationships of proteins under equilibrium, many proteins get stretched by mechanical forces in vivo. Viola Vogel pioneered novel concepts how forces can switch the structure-function relationships of proteins and how this can be exploited for clinical applications. To translate emerging mechanoregulation mechanisms to the tissue level, as they had mostly been derived using single cells, Vogel recently developed nanoscale sensors to probe tissue fiber tension in organs, and has set up de novo grown 3D microtissues to mimic essential aspects of healthy versus diseased tissue niches.
