Viola Vogel

Viola Vogel (born 1959), also known as Viola Vogel-Scheidemann, is a German biophysicist and bioengineer. She is a professor at ETH Zürich, where she is head of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology and leads the Applied Mechanobiology Laboratory. Since 2018 she has been an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the .

In 2020, Vogel was appointed by European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel to serve on an independent search committee for the next president of the European Research Council (ERC), chaired by Helga Nowotny.

Research The direction of Vogel's work is to take microscopic pieces of living tissue and investigate their mechanical properties, with a view to developing new technologies. Her interests include molecular self-assembly, cell adhesion, and the construction of biological minerals, materials, and tissues. Her experimental and computational discoveries of how stretching proteins changes their function, and how cells sense and respond to force, have applications in stem cell differentiation, tissue growth and regeneration, angiogenesis, and cancer. and shared the for Applied Physics in 2006. She was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2018, member of US National Academy of Engineering in 2020 and US National Academy of Sciences in 2021. She was elected an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2023.