BRIDGE & Connect 2025

Nicoletta Casanova is the chair of the BRIDGE Steering Committee and is member of the Innovation Council of Innosuisse. Serial entrepreneur, she is currently CEO and President of the high-tech company FEMTOprint SA. The company is a CDMO active in the watch industry, med-tech, life sciences, optics and photonics, quantum technologies and telecommunications, among others.

Torsten Schwede is the President of the Research Council of the Swiss National Foundation. He is also Professor of Structural Bioinformatics at the University of Basel and head of a research group at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. His previous roles have made him familiar both with the needs of various disciplines and with the institutional perspective of a university.

Claudia Pletscher is an entrepreneur and member of the Board of Directors for various listed companies. As a member of the Innosuisse Innovation Council on ICT topics and as an investor in start-ups, she is active in the deep tech environment and brings her expertise on digital transformation, business model innovation and platform topics into public, private and governmental organizations.

Sébastien Hug is Head Innovation Office at the University of Bern since 2021. His mission is to support entrepreneurial scientists and students; to foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship; and to proactively position the university in Switzerland’s innovation and startup ecosystem.

Bradley Nelson is Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zürich since 2002. Successful BRIDGE Discovery grantee, his research group also hosted several BRIDGE Proof of Concept fellows. He is co-founder, among others, of NanoFlex Robotics AG, OphthoRobotics AG, and Oxyle AG.

Christian Brunner is the head of the BRIDGE Office and responsible for the management of the programme. He knows BRIDGE since its beginning in 2017 and was involved in its setup in the years before. Christian has a background in Materials Science from the ETH Zurich. Before his time at the SNSF and BRIDGE, he worked as an innovation engineer in a medical device company.

Kevin Kempter has just completed his BRIDGE Proof of Concept project at the Haute école de travail social et de la santé Lausanne (HES-SO). He studied social work and started his entrepreneurship endeavour with the foundation of his start-up Elderli Sàrl.

Özge Yüzgeç has a PhD in neuroscience and has also studied industrial engineering. Her BRIDGE Proof of Concept project was hosted by the University of Geneva and focused on developing an innovative device to monitor brain activity during anesthesia and sleep.