Tanja Stadler

Tanja Stadler is a Full Professor at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in Basel. Since Feb. 2024, she is Vize-Chair of the Department. Further, Tanja is president of the external pageSwiss Science Advisory Panel COVID-19 advising the Swiss government (federal and cantonal; since 2022). Since 2023, Tanja is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and since 2024, she is also a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).

Tanja studied Applied Mathematics at the Technical University of Munich (Germany), the University of Cardiff (UK), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). She obtained a Master degree in 2006 and a PhD in 2008 from the Technical University of Munich (with Prof. Anusch Taraz and Prof. Mike Steel). Tanja then joined ETH Zürich as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Sebastian Bonhoeffer in the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, and was promoted to Group Leader in 2011. In 2014, she moved to the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering as an Assistant Professor where she obtained tenure in 2017 and was promoted to a Full Professor in 2021. At the science to policy interface, Tanja was serving as president of the external pageSwiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force advising the Swiss government from August 2021 until its termination in March 2022.

Tanja's research addresses core questions in the life sciences through an evolutionary perspective, in particular in macroevolution, epidemiology, developmental biology and immunology. The research questions include fundamental aspects such as how speciation processes led to the current biodiversity, as well as questions directly relevant to human societies, such as the spread of pathogens like COVID-19 or Ebola. Tanja assesses these questions by developing and applying statistical phylodynamic tools to estimate evolutionary and population dynamics from genomic sequencing data while in parallel leading consortia to produce such data.

Her honors include the TUM PhD award 2008, the John Maynard Smith prize 2012, the ETH Latsis prize 2013, the Zonta prize 2013, the ETH Golden Owl for teaching in 2016, the SMBE Mid-Career Excellence Award 2021, the Carus Medal 2021, the Roessler prize 2022, and the Cloëtta Jubilee Prize 2023. Tanja was elected into the Rotary Club Basel in 2023. In 2013, Tanja received an ERC starting grant. In 2020, Tanja received an ERC consolidator grant.