The Faculty of Science

The Faculty of Science was established by the University Act of 1937, marking the institutional culmination of a process of separation from the Faculty of Philosophy that lasted over a hundred years. Since then, the Faculty of Science has been able to assert and expand its role.

Today, the seven departments and two associated institutes of the faculty significantly enhance the University of Basel’s national and international standing. The faculty’s range of subjects extends from the atom to the galaxy and from the molecular basis of life to ecosystems, crossing older disciplinary boundaries and supporting interdisciplinary cooperation. This is particularly evident in the contributions to the university’s focus area of life sciences and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute. 

A milestone in the development of the Faculty of Science in the second half of the twentieth century was the establishment of the Biozentrum (Center for Molecular Life Sciences) in 1971, with the aim of uniting various biological and scientific fields under one roof to facilitate collaboration. Today, this center is among the largest and most important at the University of Basel.

Physics, chemistry, mathematics, and pharmaceutical sciences, which have a long university tradition, are intensely involved in the faculty’s research priorities and cooperate with the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Business and Economics. The Department of Computer Science, which emerged from the Institute of Computer Science in 2002, also focuses on applied informatics in this context, while giving an important role to basic scientific education.

The Department of Environmental Sciences was founded in 2006, making it one of the newer disciplinary units within the faculty. It combines Integrative biology, earth sciences, and the program Mankind-Society-Environment – a unique Basel offering – as well as prehistoric archeology and archeological sciences. Members of the department study the complex interactions between the environment and humans, both contemporary and historical, in diverse ways, through interdisciplinary cooperation, using methods from botany, zoology, ecology, physical geography, human geography, meteorology, conservation biology, biogeography, sustainable development, and archaeology.

The Friedrich Miescher Institute, affiliated with the Faculty of Science, reflects the important role of collaborations between the university and industry. The institute, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2010, is a branch of the Novartis Research Foundation and conducts basic research in cell and molecular biology, particularly on the regulatory mechanisms of growth and differentiation in animal cells and plants, as well as in the field of neurobiology.

The local-global interplay between Basel society, its political commitment to development, and the university is particularly evident in the history of the Swiss Tropical Institute, founded in 1943 by Rudolf Geigy on behalf of the federal and cantonal governments. In 2010, it merged with the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine under the new name Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, which has over 500 employees from more than 40 nations.