Hanno Würbel

Hanno Würbel

Hanno Würbel (* 1963 ) has been Professor of Animal Welfare at the Vetsuisse Faculty in Bern since summer 2011 .

academic career

Hanno Würbel studied biology with a major in zoology at the University of Bern , after which he worked for a year as a research assistant at the University of Bern on a project financed by the Swiss Federal Veterinary Office (FVO) to identify animal welfare-related problems in the keeping of laboratory animals . This resulted in his doctoral thesis on the causes and effects of posture-related behavioral disorders in laboratory mice, which he carried out under Wolfgang Langhans at ETH Zurich and completed in 1996.

As part of a junior scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he was able to continue this research with Christine J. Nicol at the University of Bristol for a year before returning to ETH Zurich in 1997 as a research assistant and lecturer in ethology, animal husbandry and animal welfare. There, under the umbrella of the Center for Neurosciences (ZNZ), he found the opportunity to further develop and expand his research in collaboration with other working groups.

In 2002 he was appointed professor for animal welfare and ethology at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. On August 1, 2011, he took up the newly created extraordinary professorship for animal welfare at the Vetsuisse Faculty in Bern.

Research priorities

The following questions are at the center of Hanno Würbel's research:

• The scientific recording of ethological demands of animals on their environment (e.g. husbandry conditions);
• Demands of animals on their keeping conditions;
• Effects of housing conditions that do not meet these requirements on behavior control and the welfare of the animals;
• Significance of behavior disorders for animal welfare;
• Improvement of conditions in animal experiments ("refinement")

Awards

• 2005 Animal Welfare Research Prize Hessen
• Felix-Wankel-Tierschutz-Forschungspreis 2009 for the work "Improving the informative value of animal experiments through systematic environmental variation", which was published in " Nature Methods " (vol. 6, p. 257). Result of the investigation: The more similar the housing conditions of the (test) mice were, the more different the results provided by the experiments.
• 2012 ERC Grant from the European Research Council

Fonts (selection)

• Hanno Würbel: "Biological foundations for ethical animal protection". Interdisciplinary Working Group on Animal Ethics (Ed.). Animal Rights - An Interdisciplinary Challenge . Erlangen 2007. ISBN 978-3-89131-417-3

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Prize Winner 2009 ( Memento of the original from September 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Website of the Felix Wankel Foundation. Retrieved November 19, 2009. 
2. ↑ Animal welfare research honored. giessener-allgemeine.de, April 16, 2009, accessed on April 17, 2009 . 
3. ↑ Andrea Six: Well-kept chaos in the laboratory. NZZ Online, April 5, 2009, accessed on April 17, 2009 . 
4. ↑ 3.3 million Swiss francs in EU funds for cell biologist and animal welfare professor at Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (idw-online.de); Retrieved November 17, 2012

Web links

• Official website of the University of Bern ( Memento from April 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive )