Michael Hengartner is President of the ETH Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the ETH Domain. The Swiss-Canadian citizen, born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, grew up in Québec City, Canada, and studied biochemistry at the Université Laval. After his PhD studies at MIT with Nobel laureate H. R. Horvitz, he led for seven years a research group at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the USA. In 2001, he became the first occupant of the Ernst Hadorn Endowed Chair for molecular biology at the University of Zurich (UZH). From 2009 to 2014, he was dean of the Faculty of Science, and from 2014 to 2020 president of UZH. From 2016 to 2020, he served as president of swissuniversities, the Swiss Rectors' Conference. Michael holds an Executive MBA from IMD, Lausanne and is the recipient of several awards for his research on the molecular basis of apoptosis, among them the Swiss National Latsis Prize, Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award, and an honorary doctorate from Sorbonne Université. In 2010, Michael received the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching at UZH. Michael founded and/or sat on the board of a number of start-ups, including the biotech company Devgen (co-founded 1997) and Kudelski Group (independent board member since 2020).