News Award
Official opening
New Swiss TPH headquarters inaugurated.
Brain research prize for Silvia Arber.
On 1 April, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) celebrated the official opening of the new building in Allschwil by the name of “Belo Horizonte” (Portuguese for “beautiful horizon”). Over recent months, the research groups, Administration and service departments, such as the Diagnostic Centre and the Swiss Centre for International Health (SCIH), have moved into the new building designed by the Basel architects Kunz & Mösch. The Centre for Tropical and Travel Medicine remains at the old location in Socinstrasse in Basel. Members of the governments of the two Basel half-cantons were joined by Martina Hirayama, State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation, and other guests for a tour of the inner workings of “Belo Horizonte” and an opportunity to exchange ideas with representatives of Swiss TPH and the University of Basel. Silvia Arber studies the neural networks that control movement.
The new “Belo Horizonte” building at the BaseLink innovation park in Allschwil, Basel-Landschaft.
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UNI NOVA
The neurobiologist Silvia Arber, who carries out research at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, is set to receive the prestigious Brain Prize from the Lundbeck Foundation alongside two other researchers. Arber will share the honor, which comes with prize money of just under CHF 1.4 million, with Ole Kiehn from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Martyn Goulding from the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, USA. The jury’s decision was motivated by the prizewinners’ groundbreaking research into the neural networks that control movement. As the jury explains, the researchers’ sophisticated experimental work has helped to improve our understanding of how intended movements are relayed from the complex networks in the brain stem to the nerve cells in the spinal cord, which control the activity of muscles in the fingers, arms and legs, for example. These insights provide a valuable basis for cell typespecific diagnosis and treatment for motor disturbances such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease and spinal cord injuries.
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