Leadership transition at Singapore-ETH Centre
Prof Peter Edwards steps down from his role as director of the Singapore-ETH Centre and hands over leadership of the centre to Prof Gerhard Schmitt on 1 October 2017.
“As a plant ecologist, I have spent most of my life staying away from cities. But I found myself in a community among architects, engineers, urban planners and social scientists studying cities, where I was the only natural scientist,” Prof Peter Edwards quipped as he spoke of his experience as director of the Singapore-ETH Centre over the past four years.
The Singapore-ETH Centre currently runs two programmes - Future Cities Laboratory and the Future Resilience Systems. Both programmes address important topics resulting from rapid urbanisation and densification. Looking at the growth of the centre since he took the helm, Peter Edwards has taken the centre to a new level since he packed his bags in Zurich and moved to Singapore in 2013.
As professor of Plant Ecology at ETH Zurich since 1993 and having served as chairman of the department of Environmental Systems Science, Peter Edwards had been studying cities in Singapore, but never too removed from his first love - plants and vegetation. At the Future Cities Laboratory—the first programme of the Singapore-ETH Centre—he is principal investigator of the reseach project ‘Ecosystem Services in Urban Landscapes’. He leads a team to find means to maximise ecosystem benefits in urban environments and brings new insights and attention to the important co-existence of ecosystems and the built environment to make cities more resilient.
Peter Edwards has always had a strong interest in the application of science and technology for better policy. He was founder and first executive secretary of the Institute for Ecology and Environmental Management—a professional organisation for environmental practitioners—and was instrumental in setting up the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy in ETH Zurich. In Singapore, he initiated the annual Science, Technology and Policy workshop in 2016, together with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). The goal is to equip young scientists with the necessary skills to deal with the complex issues of today, which are often at the intersection of science, technology and policy.
The Singapore-ETH Centre’s networks continue grew under the leadership of Peter Edwards. In ETH Zurich, he was faculty coordinator and member of the executive board of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, a research partnership between several leading universities. He continued to engage with the wider community in Singapore and beyond through events such as IARU, World Economic Forum, Commonwealth Science Conference, and World Water Week, where he took the opportunity to open doors for future collaboration.
One notable project he took on is the Cooling Singapore project as lead principal investigator. The research project that started in January 2017 is the first project funded by the National Research Foundation that brings together several research centres including Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), TUM CREATE and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
After four good years, Peter Edwards steps down from his position as director of the Singapore-ETH Centre and hands leadership of the centre to Prof Gerhard Schmitt on 1 October 2017. Gerhard Schmitt, ETH Professor for Information Architecture, was the founding director of the centre in 2010. He started the centre with a mere handful of researchers and administrators but it grew quickly under his leadership in the first three years. Today, he is set to take the reins of the same centre that now brings together some 200 researchers from 36 countries.
Returning to the centre with no less enthusiasm than he did when he took on the role seven years ago, Gerhard Schmitt says, “I want the SEC to become the CERN of urban planning, resilient systems and personalised digital health. We need to intensify the research contacts and exchange of ideas and people between Switzerland, Singapore and researchers in many other countries, and reinforce the existing networks in Zurich and Singapore. This will give us the strength we need to tackle the complex problems that lie ahead."