Haller Medall

Sandra Brügger is pursuing her scientific career with determination. During her doctorate, which she completed summa cum laude, she reconstructed past vegetation changes and made it into the New York Times as a specialist in pollen stored in glacier ice. A profile story of her on the OCCR website was entitled ‘The Frozen Pollen Report’. The young scientist then moved on to the USA as an SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellow. She first worked at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. She then moved to Montana State University in Bozeman. The palaeoecologist has been researching in Switzerland again since 2022. She received an SNFS Ambizione grant for her project ‘FrozenEcosystems - Understanding Siberia's past with a combination of state-of-the-art and next-generation ice core methods’ and is now project leader in the Geoecology research group in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel.

The successful young researcher will be awarded the Haller Medal at the Dies Academicus of the University of Bern on 7 December 2024.