The Board
The role of the Board is to advise the Global SNSF Fellows Network in such a way that it is able to pursue its purpose, mission, and vision. The Board is responsible for and has the authority to determine matters relating to the policies, practices, administration, and operations of the Network, including ensuring good governance and determining the strategic vision and activities of the Network. Please find more details in our board charter here.
Join the Board
As the sustainability of the board is our top priority, we are looking for new board members. If you are interested in contributing to the network and supporting SNSF Fellows in their journeys abroad, and to help shape the vision of our network, please get in touch with us either by email (board[at]globalsfellows.net) or contact us via slack.
Tobias Schneider
Tobi is dedicated to investigating lakes and their sediments in order to unravel the local and regional environmental, climatic, and pollution conditions of the past of these crucial ecosystems. He applies a wide range of techniques to elucidate the nexus of past climate, humans, and environments. So far, he was involved in fieldwork campaigns in Central Chile, the Ecuadorian Andes, USA, Switzerland, and South and North Greenland and analyzed sediment cores from a variety of lakes in these regions.
Currently, he is conducting his SNSF Postdoc.Mobility return grant project at EAWAG Dübendorf (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology). Previously, he was an Early Postdoc.Mobility fellow at the Geoscience Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Massachusetts), and a Postdoc.Mobility fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of the Columbia University (New York).
Alongside his research, he co-founded with Alessandra and Vanessa the Global SNSF Fellows Network in which he serves as a board member.
Vanessa Jaiteh
Ness is a transdisciplinary marine scientist with a broad interest in issues affecting ecological and social sustainability in tropical fisheries. She has studied marine megafauna behaviour, protected and endangered species bycatch in industrial fisheries, shark fishing livelihoods, and marine protected area effectiveness in Australia, Indonesia, Palau, and Ghana. In between research projects, she has worked for the Australian and Palauan governments and on various consultancies in the Pacific region. She has completed an SNSF Early.Postdoc project on bycatch in Palau’s tuna fisheries, and a Postdoc.Mobility project studying fisher safety and working conditions in Ghana’s fisheries.
Having spent most of her career in remote places, connecting with researchers around the world has been very important to her - which is why, in 2020, she helped co-found the Global SNSF Fellows Network with Alessandra and Tobi. in 2023, she started working on a project to improve quality control of seafood sustainability in Switzerland, funded through an SNSF Return grant and hosted by the University of Bern.
Celia Chui
Celia Chui is an Assistant Professor of Management at HEC Montreal. Prior to joining HEC Montreal, Celia was a SNSF postdoctoral fellow at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and a SNSF visiting predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She holds a PhD in Economic Sciences with a specialization in Management from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Using experimental and mixed field methods, her research focuses on decision-making and ethics in organizational and social settings, including issues related to prosocial behavior and gender. Her work on how situational factors influence moral judgment, social norms, and ethical decision-making demonstrates the malleability of morality and why good people can sometimes do bad things.
Joining the co-founders of the SNSF Global Fellows (Alessandra, Tobi, and Vanessa), in 2022, she currently serves as a board member to support and promote the professional careers of SNSF Fellows around the world.
Katharina Tabea Jungo
Katharina currently is a SNSF postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences (C4HDS) and the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School. Prior to moving to Boston, Katharina has worked as a team leader and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Primary Health Care of the University of Bern, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Health Sciences with a specialization in Epidemiology form the University of Bern in Switzerland. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, Katharina’s research interests include novel digital health interventions to optimize medication use in patients with polypharmacy and patient-centered approaches to deprescribing.
Shriya Palchaudhuri
Shriya is a neuroscientist at the New York University School of Medicine, USA, where her postdoctoral research is funded by the SNSF Postdoc.Mobility. She is dedicated to unraveling how defined neural circuits underlie behavior. Her current research is focused on understanding how striatal circuits are influenced by the neuromodulator dopamine in processing sensory information of multiple modalities, leading to meaningful behavioral outcomes. She uses various techniques such as in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics and electrophysiology combined with viral strategies to answer these questions.
She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Prior to her doctoral studies, she graduated with an M.S. in Physiology from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India and a B.S. in Physiology from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, India.
She has been actively involved in many science communication and awareness projects through her career. She recently joined the Global SNSF Fellows Network as a Board Member (2023), and hopes to promote and serve a cohesive and engaging community of exceptional scientists further their professional goals.
Martin Gjoreski
Martin Gjoreski is a SNSF Ambizione fellow and senior scientific collaborator at the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland. His research field is AI, with a focus on machine learning, federated learning, and explainable AI (XAI) in fields such as wearable computing, affective computing, and digital healthcare. Martin holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, supervised by profs. Matjaz Gams and Mitja Lustrek. Martin was awarded the “Jožef Stefan golden emblem,” signifying an outstanding PhD thesis in Slovenia. He was also featured on the "list of the top 2% scientists in the world” in the category "single year impact – 2021”. Since 2023, Martin serves as an Associate Editor at IMWUT (ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies); and as a Board Member at the Global SNSF Fellows Network.
Melissa Rérat
Melissa Rérat is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research project entitled "The Role of Art Schools in the Renewal of the Discipline of Art History. The Case of Vienna between 1970 and 1998" is supported by a Postdoc.Mobility fellowship awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Previously she was a scientific collaborator at the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA) and a lecturer on New Media and Video Art at the University of Neuchâtel. Her doctoral thesis in Art History and Sociology (2020, published in 2022) studied the social construction of video art through discourse in the 1970s. After having participated in the SNSF DORE research project "Kristallisationsorte der Schweizer Kunst der 1970er Jahre. Aarau - Genf - Luzern" (Crystallization Sites of Swiss Art in the 1970s. Aarau - Geneva - Lucerne, 2011-2014), she published a study dedicated to video art by women ("L'Art vidéo au féminin", 2014). Her research concerns the history of art schools, art history as a discipline, the crossing between sociology and art history, the interaction between contemporary art, modern art and art history, video art and new media, and gender questions in contemporary art. She joined the Global SNSF Fellows Network as a Board Member in 2023 and hopes to represent researchers in the humanities and social sciences and highlight the specific features of careers in this field.
Merve Erdem Burger
Merve Erdem Burger is an SNSF postdoctoral researcher at the University of Neuchâtel Faculty of Law in the Chair of International Law. She holds a master's degree and a doctorate in public law (with a focus on international law) from the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Ankara University, where she worked as a research assistant before moving to Switzerland.
She has conducted several studies on various topics of international law, such as the legal regime of outer space and space activities, the interpretation of international treaties, the protection of cultural heritage in armed conflict, cybersecurity in international law, and the immunity of states from jurisdiction in case of violations of jus cogens by states. Most recently, she has been working on the implementation of international space law into national legal systems. She is a member of the Workforce Development - Young Professionals Program Committee of the International Astronautical Federation, a member of the International Institute of Space Law, co-founder of the Swiss Space Law Forum and recently became one of the board members of the Global SNSF Fellows Network.
Alessandra Ferrario (Observer)
Alessandra Ferrario is a researcher working at the intersection of health policy, health economics, health systems and health service research. Her research investigates determinants of access, or lack thereof, health care technologies and services.
Her current research investigates changes in use of palliative and hospice care for cancer patients in the US following the introduction of immune-checkpoint inhibitors. Together with Indonesian colleagues, she is researching the causes of recurrent shortages of essential pediatric cancer medicines in Indonesia to identify possible mitigation strategies and solutions.
She is very interested in promoting greater use of data, particularly routinely collected data, to address policy and practice relevant questions and has been actively working with different countries to this end.
Alessandra was awarded two SNSF postdoctoral Fellowships by the SNSF and a Pyle Fellowship by Harvard Medical School. She holds a BSc in molecular Biology and an MSc in Epidemiology from the University of Basel, an MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a PhD from the London School of Economics.
Her interest in creating a community of SNSF Fellows and more opportunities for talented scientists to pursue academic careers led her to co-found the SNSF global Fellows network with Tobias and Vanessa.