Conversation with the artist Olaf Nicolai
For the first SciArt SwitzlerlAnd event, Olaf Nicolai, one of Germany's leading artists, will explore his relationship with science in a conversation moderated by Valentino Catricalà, researcher and curator of contemporary art.
Latest from our blog
This blog is dedicated to the most advanced frontiers of scientific research and the innovative therapies that are being tried out around the world. Furthermore it embrace the dialogue between researchers and artists to overcome the damaging barriers that exist between humanist and scientific culture.
Hope from an mRNA vaccine against pancreatic cancer
Start ReadingA growing focus on Culture and Health
Start ReadingAre there signs of consciousness at the moment of death?
Start ReadingHighlighted activities
Una scienza fatta di persone
Discover the faces of those who are involved in research in Ticino every day: in collaboration with Ticino Scienza, we have created an archive (the first of its kind) of researchers active in the canton, their scientific production and the public institutes and companies in which they work.
Winners Award Ceremony
The Award Ceremony for the 10th IBSA Foundation Fellowships took place on 20 April at IBSA's new cosmos facility. The 6 winners were awarded.
Personalized therapy in oncology
A new edition of the IBSA Foundation Special Forum, which will take place on 16 June 2023 in the auditorium of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano, will be part of the programme of the 17th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma (ICML).
IBSA Foundation
Our Mission
IBSA Foundation is committed to promoting the culture of frontier science. It does so by sharing principles and knowledge, using a language which is accessible to all to encourage the public at large to learn more about health and wellbeing. The Foundation also harnesses different mediums such as art, music and comic strips to communicate with audiences across many generations and convey scientific knowledge.
IBSA Foundation contributes to debate in international science by staging Forums on the results of the latest research in medicine and wellbeing, aimed at scientists, researchers and experts in the field.
IBSA Foundation supports young students and researchers with its annual Fellowships in a variety of basic research fields. It also fosters academic studies with funding for the Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biomedicine at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI).
Read the Bylaws
Our team
IBSA Foundation avails of two Boards: two committees of experts in cultural, academic and scientific fields who help bring together events, projects and partnerships.
The Advisory Board of IBSA Foundation includes influential figures from both academic and cultural spheres. The Scientific Board, on the other hand, sees representatives of international standing from the scientific community.
Both Boards are coordinated by Silvia Misiti, Director of IBSA Foundation. She is supported by Irene Belatti e Jacopo Crespi for Communication and Sara Comodo for Admin and Events.
- Advisory board
- Scientific board
Partnerships
IBSA Foundation works alongside academic and cultural organisations to help achieve its mission:
IBSA Foundation and the City of Lugano have set up a 2020-2022 three-year project aimed at promoting the integration of the arts in healthcare facilities. The Cultura e Salute (“Culture and Health“) project promotes and supports initiatives and good practices that see the alliance between art and health as a new tool for increasing people’s quality of life.
The project stems from the knowledge that a greater alliance between two seemingly distant worlds, like art and physical and psychological wellbeing, can result in better standards of living, both inside and outside healthcare facilities and treatment centers, as demonstrated by various initiatives over the years in Switzerland and abroad. The Cultura e Salute project will also be backed by a prestigious Scientific Committee and will count on the collaboration with USI – Università della Svizzera italiana.
The Cultura e Salute project will focus on three main activities: the organization of annual forums on the relationship between culture and health; the launch of a website culturaesalute.ch; and a fund to support partnership projects between artists and healthcare facilities for the development of cultural activities in treatment centers, which will be launched in the fall of 2020 with a public notice aimed at organizations in the region interested in contributing to this initiative.
IBSA Foundation has been working with the Department of Education, Culture and Sport of Canton Ticino (DECS) since 2018.
The partnership, which involves the DECS secondary education division and the secondary school students in Ticino, led to the creation of the Let’s Science! series of books.
In each book the scientist introduces and explains a particular topic, which is then reworked by the students, becoming a comic strip inspired by the lesson.
Let’s Science! the creative science project, designed and promoted as a way of spreading scientific knowledge and targeted primarily at middle school students in Ticino, is one of the highlights of this collaboration and has seen two editions already in 2018 and 2019.
IBSA Foundation, with the online portal Ticino Scienza, and LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, through the cultural space LAC edu, kick off a new collaboration.
"Lingua Madre - capsule per il futuro" is a project born from the urgency of the present time. With a very innovative content, it covers three macro thematic areas: Body, Language and Rite. Within the vast programme is a cycle of four conferences to address the problem of language from different points of view.
The conferences are organised by LAC edu in collaboration with Ticino Scienza. They will be recorded and broadcasted online from the end of March until the last days of May 2021
The successful cycle of conversations “La Scienza a regola d’Arte”, which started in 2017, continues and, as of 2021, the partnership with the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI Lugano) strengthens. IBSA Foundation is now the exclusive Scientific Partner of the Museum for all exhibitions held at MASI and Palazzo Reali in Lugano.
IBSA Foundation has always believed that science deserves to be identified as a culture and, as such, to belong to the world of humanistic disciplines: in this sense, the encounter between science and art is not only possible, but natural.
Since 2019 IBSA Foundation is partner of Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. The collaboration has been established in the year that celebrated 500 years from the death of Leonardo da Vinci.
Encouraged by the common commitment in promoting the dialogue between scientific and humanistic disciplines, together with the passion for scientific dissemination, IBSA Foundation is the Scientific Partner of the Museum.
This partnership is developing through a series of activities that will be better described in the Activities section of this website: find out the details of the last initiative organised in 2020, #storieaportechiuse.
IBSA Foundation is the first partner to join the Mission Partnership program, created in 2021 to support the cultural and educational activities of the museum. In addition, the IBSA Foundation will be collaborating on the Future Inventors project: two interactive digital installations by two international artists that will be housed in the museum (autumn 2021).
IBSA Foundation has chosen to support MUSE – Science Museum by Renzo Piano in Trento with a two-year Partnership.
MUSE is one of the most important science museums in Europe with almost 500,000 visitors per year and a unique example of scientific dissemination and cultural promotion, collaborating with more than 200 institutes and universities worldwide.
This partnership is developing through a series of activities that will be held throughout the year, more details on which can be found in the Projects section of this website: find out the details of the last initiative organised in 2020, MUSE per #iorestoacasa.
For a number of years now, IBSA Foundation has worked with Rome-based comic strip school Scuola Romana dei Fumetti and Carocci Editore publishing, as part of the Let’s Science! project. Offering a creative journey into the sciences, it is designed and promoted to be used as a means of raising scientific awareness aimed chiefly at secondary school pupils.
Since 2016, IBSA Foundation has supported the work of “L’ideatorio” - the service for promoting scientific culture and dialogue between science and society run by Università della Svizzera italiana. L’ideatorio is the regional antenna of the Science et Cité Foundation. It is a centre of competence for the Swiss Academies of the Sciences, and also works in conjunction with the education department of the City of Lugano.
The aim of L’ideatorio is to ensure science and its societal challenges are made accessible and transparent to as many people as possible, encouraging responsible, critical dialogue on scientific and technological progress.
Since 2017, the IBSA Foundation has set up annual renewable scholarships as a contribution to encourage academic studies in medicine. The scholarships are intended for students enrolled in Bachelor's and Master's programmes in the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI Lugano).