2021

D-MTEC offices are closed for the Christmas and New Year holidays from 24 December 2021 until 7 January 2022.

Professor Lucas Bretschger has won the 2021 Golden Owl at D-MTEC. The prize is awarded annually by the ETH student association for outstanding teaching. Professor Bretschger, one of the founding members of our department, here reveals some of the elements that make his lectures stand out.

Selected by MIT Technology Review as one of its “35 Innovators under 35” for 2021, George Boateng is a pioneer of smartphone-based online coding education in Africa. He is also a doctoral candidate in applied machine learning at D-MTEC. We spoke with him about his educational and entrepreneurial journey and his experiences as a Black African in Switzerland.

Why do investors punish benchmark-failing companies more than they reward those exceeding their benchmarks? MSc MTEC student Jonas Reinecke spent six months at Stanford trying to find out. His thesis won the Ernst Blickle Graduate award from the SEW-EURODRIVE-Foundation in 2021.

Inflation and education are at the heart of the discussion of a post-pandemic future. Ursula Renold and Jan-Egbert Sturm share their expertise on these issues in interviews. Their expectations are positive.

On 22 October 2021, the MTEC Department honoured its MSc, MAS and doctoral graduates at this year’s MTEC Day. MTEC Day is an annual event that brings together graduates, alumni, faculty and key stakeholders from business and academia, with the aim of strengthening the personal and professional relationships between them.

The MTEC Buddies Programme for MSc students is launched with a foxtrail scavenger hunt for the ages.

Jointly initiated by Micheline Calmy-Rey – former member of the Swiss Federal Council – and D-MTEC's Professor Michael Ambühl, ETH Zurich and UNIGE have founded the Lab for Science in Diplomacy (SiDLab). It shall leverage quantitative and computational methods to address the complexity of negotiation problems – both in practice and analysis.

Following troubles in global supply chains, KOF Swiss Economic Institute revised their economic growth forecast for 2021 to +3.2%. The recovery from the pandemic shifts to 2022, says KOF Director Jan-Egbert Sturm.

To recover from the pandemic, subsidies and payments abound globally. Banks lend and buy readily. As they do not face the same increase in regulations compared to after the financial crisis this increases the risk for inflation, D-MTEC's Hans Gersbach says to Handelsblatt.