Professor Viola Vogel, Department of Materials, is heading the Laboratory for Biologically Oriented Materials at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. She received her Doctorate in Physics from Frankfurt University after completing her graduate research at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and started her academic career in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle (1991). She was the Founding Director of the Centre for Nanotechnology at the University of Washington (1997-2003), and moved to the ETH in 2004. Major awards include the Otto-Hahn Medal from the Max-Planck Society (1988), the "FIRST" Award by the National Institutes of Health (General Medicine) (1993), Research Award from the Philip Morris Foundation (2005), the Julius Springer Award for Applied Physics (2006), and the ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (2008).