USI appoints a President, two Pro-Rectors, and introduces an Academic Senate

The Council of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), during its ordinary meeting on Friday, December 2nd, 2016, has approved a few key organisational changes. In addition to nominating a President of the University Council, USI has appointed two Pro-Rectors and has instituted an Academic Senate. The new governance model of USI is thus reinforced and the appropriate structure for the management of ongoing developments at the University is being implemented.

A press conference is called on Monday, December 12th, at 11 a.m. in the Lugano campus Auditorium. USI Rector Prof. Boas Erez – together with the President of the University Council, Dr. Monica Duca Widmer, and the newly appointed Pro-Rectors, Professor Daniela Mondini and Professor Michele Lanza – shall outline these changes and present to the media and the academic community a review of his first 100 days in office.

Monica Duca Widmer graduated in chemical engineering at the ETH Zurich and earned a PhD at the University of Milan. For over 20 years she has been the Director and Chairwoman of EcoRisana SA, a company offering appraisals, analysis and resolution of problems related to contaminated sites and environmental pollution. Monica Duca Widmer, 57, has been conferred a number of academic and public mandates. From 1998 to 2008, she was Board member of the Federal technical institutes, and from 2004 to 2015 Board member of SUPSI. Since 2009, she is member of the Federal Committee on Energy Research (CORE) and since 2012 Board member of the University of Lucerne. In 2016, she was appointed Board member of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), in the role of vice-president of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW.

Daniela Mondini is Full Professor at the USI Academy of Architecture. She teaches and conducts research at the Institute for the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA) and at the Institute of Italian Studies (ISI, Faculty of Communication Sciences). She studied History of Art and History at the University of Zurich and the Università La Sapienza in Rome; she was an assistant and SNSF researcher of the University of Zurich (2002 PhD; 2010 Habilitation). She has lectured at the Technische Universität München, the Hochschule der Künste in Zürich, the ETH Zurich and the University of Bern. She was responsible for the project funded by the SNSF “From Ravenna to Vals. Light and Darkness in Architecture from the Middle Ages to the Present”. Prof. Mondini is currently responsible with Prof. Dr. Carola Jäggi (University of Zurich) for the SNSF-funded project “The Churches of Rome in the Middle Ages 1050-1300”.

Michele Lanza is Full Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Informatics, which he co-founded in 2004. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2003 at the University of Bern, received the prestigious European Ernst Denert award for best thesis in software engineering of 2003. Prof. Lanza received the Credit Suisse Award for best teaching in 2007 and 2009. At the University of Lugano Prof. Lanza leads the REVEAL research group, working in the areas of software visualization, evolution, and analytics. He authored more than peer-reviewed 100 articles and the book "Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice". Prof. Lanza is involved in a number of scientific communities, and has served on more than 80 program committees. He is president of CHOOSE (the Swiss Object-Oriented Software Engineering society). He was program co-chair of ICSM (the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance) in 2010, of MSR (the Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories) in 2007 and 2008, of VISSOFT (the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization) in 2009, of IWPSE (the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution) in 2007. He was General Chair of ESUG 2007 (15th International Smalltalk Conference). He is steering committee member of ICSM, MSR, VISSOFT, Softvis, and IWPSE.

High-resolution portraits of the nominees attached.