All change at the top: Matthias Egger (left) handed over the presidency of the SNSF Research Council to Torsten Schwede at the close of 2024. | Photo: Fabian Hugo

Matthias Egger, you were President of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) for eight years. What was your biggest success?

The SNSF has undergone considerable development, with teamwork always the key element. As for the biggest success, I think that was transforming the SNSF into a modern, evidence-based organisation. Some of its existing structures at the time dated back to the 1970s. Important innovations include giving the research councils more authority to determine the SNSF’s political strategy. Or enabling universities and other scientific institutions to express their opinions to the SNSF Delegates Assembly. When awarding funding, we are now guided by so-called best practices for evaluation. Project assessments and funding decisions have been separated, which makes the process fairer and more transparent. What’s more, greater attention is being paid to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. In such projects, researchers from different disciplines work together with experts from the practical field in order to tackle complex problems such as sustainable development.

Photo: Nicolas Brodard/SNSF

It was your idea to have the SNSF subject its own funding processes to scientific analysis. What did that achieve?

We launched studies such as the Career Tracker Cohorts to track the development of young researchers. Peer review is another such example. Our analyses showed that male reviewers tend to evaluate women more critically than men. Women, on the other hand, apply roughly equal criteria when assessing both male and female applicants. This realisation is now being incorporated in training the committees that evaluate projects. We are still working on using artificial intelligence to analyse the content of peer reviews. Our aim is to improve the quality of these reviews.

Open Science is very important to you. Are you satisfied with the current state of research in this regard?

We were able to increase the proportion of open-access publications from SNSF-funded research projects from 50 percent to over 80. These are accordingly accessible for free all over the world. But all the same, a fundamental problem remains. Taxpayers are still paying twice – once for the research itself, and a second time to make the results of that research accessible. The SNSF currently covers the fees that researchers have to pay to publishers for releasing work on open access. I hope that the SNSF will soon be able to withdraw from this in order for those funds to be invested directly in research itself. The core problem lies with the publishing industry, which functions on prestige and can continue to insist on high prices. A culture that prioritises the name of a journal over the quality and impact of its articles will have to change.

You played a crucial role as the head of the scientific task force during the pandemic. What would you do differently today?

I’d set up an additional group for political communication and analysis, alongside the ten expert groups that we had at the time. The potential conflicts in the relationship between science and politics became obvious during the pandemic. Researchers want to achieve scientific results and use these to develop recommendations for action. Politicians, on the other hand, advocate clear positions and endeavour to convince others of them. In doing so, they often pick and choose what scientific findings suit them. This dynamic leads to tension between scientists and politicians, especially since science itself is not devoid of differences of opinion. The dialogue between politics and science should definitely be intensified.

Photo: Adrian Moser/SNSF

Torsten Schwede, you assumed the presidency of the SNSF Research Council at the start of 2025. What’s your most important goal for the coming years?

I’d like to help Swiss research to enjoy good framework conditions in the future, as it does now, and to ensure that it remains at the forefront worldwide. For the SNSF and for science and scholarship in general, dealing with artificial intelligence is going to be one of the most important topics. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to researchers from the company DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, for developing a software algorithm to predict three-dimensional protein structures. This demonstrates the great potential of AI in tackling fundamental scientific issues successfully. But it also highlights the challenges that academia is going to face in this critical technological field as it tries to keep pace with industry.

The federal government wants to cut the budget for education and research by more than 10 percent. Can you understand their reasoning for this?

The planned reduction by over 10 percent in the SNSF’s annual budget from 2026 would be dramatic for science in Switzerland. Projects funded by the SNSF run for several years. So around 80 percent of this year’s budget has already been allocated. A 10 percent reduction in the overall budget would therefore have to be achieved through massive cuts within the 20 percent of the remaining funds for new projects. That would be historically unprecedented. There’s never been anything like it in the history of the SNSF! Most SNSF funds are spent on salaries – such as the wages paid to doctoral students and postdocs. Cuts would force savings in exactly the wrong place: among the best scientific projects and among young researchers at the start of their careers. Switzerland’s prosperity depends to a significant extent on well-trained experts and innovative companies.

There are currently two prominent demands in the world of science and scholarship: diversity among researchers, and funding the best of them. What options do you see for solving this dilemma?

What ultimately counts is the quality of the research. Funding excellent research projects is also enshrined in the SNSF’s legal mandate. But excellence has many different dimensions and can manifest itself in many different ways. This is why the SNSF has developed a model to reflect this diversity. As a learning organisation, it has to review its evaluation criteria on a continuous basis, along with their impact on diversity and on the quality of the research that it funds.

Public ostracism – commonly known as ‘cancel culture’ – is coming into conflict with academic freedom and freedom of speech at universities. In Germany, a doctoral student has been criticised as being ‘inhumane’ because she intended giving a lecture on gender in biology. What would you say to a student who wants to prevent such a lecture?

I can’t understand it when researchers won’t let each other have their say any more. Universities have to be a site of critical dialogue – and this includes engaging with opinions that you yourself might consider to be wrong. But this presupposes that such dialogue takes place within a framework that serves the pursuit of scientific or scholarly knowledge. It’s a different situation when we’re dealing with people who hold extreme political views and who refuse to accept scientific arguments. For my part, I wouldn’t offer a platform to such people. We learn nothing new from them and only damage the reputation of our institutions.