Prof. Matthias Baumgartner will take over as Chair of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) in 2025, succeeding Urs Frey, who has led the network since 2019. Baumgartner will accompany SPHN and its Data Coordination Center (DCC) into the maintenance phase.
Matthias Baumgartner is Full Professor of Metabolic Diseases at the University of Zurich, Director of Research and Teaching at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich, and head of the Department of Metabolic Diseases. From 2012 to 2018, he headed the Rare Disease Initiative at the University of Zurich, a University Research Priority Program. This resulted in the Swiss Rare Disease Registry, among other things. Matthias Baumgartner is president of SwissPedNet, the Swiss network of pediatric research centers, and a founding and board member of kosek, the national coordination body for rare diseases, which was co-founded by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS). The SAMS Board, General Secretariat, and the SPHN Management Office team are delighted to once again have an experienced physician and clinical researcher with a Swiss-wide network at the helm of SPHN.
One may think that the job description of the SPHN President calls for a pediatrician: Urs Frey is Medical Director of the University Children’s Hospital Basel and holds the Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Basel. He is a respected researcher in Pediatrics and Epidemiology. As such, he was well informed when advocating for making health-related data interoperable and reusable for research in Switzerland.
With his persuasiveness, inexhaustible energy and great humanity, Urs Frey has led SPHN to where it is today: a network with over 30 institutions, used by over 800 researchers; 4 National Data Streams projects established together with the ETH domain PHRT; and around 60 funded projects and collaborations. In other words, a national research data infrastructure for the next generation of researchers.