Dr. Bettina Zimmermann

Research fellow

Dr. Bettina Zimmermann is a research fellow at the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and also a senior researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Basel in Switzerland. She is interested in how public debates and communication shape individual perceptions and political decisions about health prevention, focusing on genomics, new health technologies, and infectious diseases.

She completed her dissertation in 2020 on "Informed Decision Making for Genetic Testing: Public discourse and individual choice" summa cum laude During her postdoc, Bettina worked on the role of solidarity in people’s behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic (SolPan project), the role of scientific advisory bodies in pandemic policy responses (ESPRIM project) and the use of social media as a recruitment tool for clinical studies (TherVacB project).

Bettina has already received several research grants for young researchers and successfully led research projects. For example, she received the Käthe-Zingg Schwichtenberg Fund of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences in 2019, the Research Fund for Young Investigators of the University of Basel in 2020, and 2022 an Early Career Research Grant for Women from the Multidisciplinary Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Bern.