Projects

This project places patients with musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions at the centre of agenda-setting to ensure future research and care are aligned with their real-world needs and priorities.

The ‘Wir sind Wetzikon’ (We are Wetzikon) project is aimed at everyone who lives in the town of Wetzikon in the Zurich Oberland and works in the field of integration and socio-cultural participation. We ask what is needed to create a more shared urban experience. We work with individuals, communities and associations, social partners and the town of Wetzikon.

MAGIC explores how modern fairy tales can support children’s language, emotional, and social development between the ages of 4 and 8. Together with families and community members, who take part as citizen scientists, we create new storytelling formats and bring fairy tales into today’s world.

In BRIDGE-CRC, we want to find novel, creative ways for making the Lucerne colorectal cancer screening program more accessible – with community pharmacies as the linchpin.

This project invites refugee children to explore and map their city’s green spaces, learn through citi-zen science, and feel more at home—while helping to make our communities more inclusive and connected.

Meno Swiss is a participatory research project that explores how women in Switzerland recognize and respond to early perimenopausal symptoms, aiming to improve awareness and well-being.

RIECS-Concept is a three-year European initiative supported by Horizon Infrastructures 2024, launched in January 2025 to design a dedicated Research Infrastructure for Excellence in Citizen Science (RIECS).

In the project, we establish a Citizen Science network at higher education institutions across Switzerland to catalyze Citizen Science research linked to sustainability.

With 17 interactive experiments, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is transforming itself into a laboratory of the future and investigating how digital technologies and artificial intelligence can be used to exhibit and communicate objects in new ways.

The project aims to raise awareness on ageism (i.e., stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination based on age) and enhance research by collecting real-life experiences from citizens. Based on these efforts, the project will develop strategies to counteract ageism and build a community committed to age inclusion.

How do students use Artificial Intelligence for major writing tasks? This project investigates school writing practices to understand the role of AI in the writing process and identify the key skills re-quired.

How to avoid pneumonia while hospitalized? The project involves patients and family members in pneumonia prevention.

What are Swiss homeowner's experiences with solar energy? The project collects stories and technical data to understand motivations, challenges and the real-world performance of their solar systems.

The project has developed a camera equipped, smart bird feeder that uses artificial intelligence to collect data on each individual bird that visits the feeder.

In this project, adolescents with chronic pain discuss and define the topics and questions they think are most important for research to tackle. They themselves lead this research project, and create a research agenda.

Many young people with hearing loss find it difficult to understand grammatically demanding written texts. The project aims to find out more about the causes.

How much wild boar is still left in our domestic pig? Help us assess natural behaviour of pigs.

A Citizen Science project combining AI and satellite images to evaluate rivers' wildness.

Hair salons as innovative community spaces for the provision of sexual and reproductive health services to young women in Lesotho and Switzerland: a survey in collaboration with Citizen Scientists.

Are Swiss companies complying with the new reporting requirements on sustainability-related matters in the aftermath of the Konzernverantwortungsinitiative?

This project aims to increase the importance of neonatal research to families and ultimately to society.

In a partnership between the Kantonsschule Wattwil and the University of Zurich, this project enables young people to explore the oral microbiome across different generations and gain valuable experience.

The project investigates how patients, their relatives, and researchers work together in health research and how collaboration affects the research process and outcomes in health care.

This project takes a participatory approach to researching the health of free-roaming cats in Zurich and their impact on wildlife.

Investigating innovative pulse and cereal-based food fermentations together with the health effects and consumer perception of novel fermented foods.

New form of governance in societal transition for healthy lifestyle.

Together with citizens the projects explores the air quality in indoor spaces and its affects on our health and well-being.

In close cooperation with citizens, the project is developing an easy-to-implement guide to dispute resolution to deal with differences of opinion within families and among friends.

CrowdWater is a Citizen Science project to collect hydrological data. The goal is to develop a cheap and easy to use method of data collection that can be used to predict floods and low flow.

This project looks for health in the lives of physically and mentally ill, socially disadvantaged person. Does it exist? What is needed for it, when and where?

Through a transdisciplinary exchange a holistic care is created that also offers answers and solutions outside of medicine for non-medical questions and problems.

Participatory focus groups to develop a scientific pilot project for long-term, more sustainable viticulture in Switzerland.

In cooperation with students from the QUIMS school in Stettbach, the project explores the forms, functions and contexts of young people's multilingual writing and speaking and their perception of this multi-layered context.

An ethnological museum is transformed from a place of representation to a knowledge workshop. This project ties the collections back into the original societies and explores world knowledge together with them.

Agroecological principles such as ecologically-sustainable and socially-just management can help to overcome the manifold crises of our time - especially in cities. This project initiated a living lab that dealt with the concept and implementation of urban agroecology in Zurich.

By analyzing Swiss newspapers, researchers and citizens together find out how the topic of "out-of-home placement of children and adolescents" was addressed and negotiated in the media in the 20th century.

People affected by Long Covid and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome identified research questions relevant to them with the support of researchers from UZH and developed a research agenda for Switzerland.

Previous research findings were complemented by volunteer work in the city of Zurich to explore the potential of urban mini-green spaces as networks of pollinator paradises.

Development of a learning module in which students learn to obtain data on their own social media use, evaluate it, and critically reflect on their own usage behavior.

The project investigated how science communication in museums can look like when it is not initiated by the museum staff but by the visitors.

In the Peer2Peer project, a participatory approach was developed and tested with young people, which enables them to deal with health and development-related topics on their own responsibility.

With the participation of affected persons, relatives and professionals, this project explores the question of how it can be possible to talk about the experience of mental illness.

Based on historical data, relict populations of aquatic insects that are important for the recolonization of renatured water bodies were identified.

An ethnographic study on participatory research was used to search for stories and representations in the Lucerne Rigi communities of Greppen, Vitznau and Weggis that have so far been missing.

This project researched the topic of participatory research and dealt with experiences with and effects of participation.

Private garden owners, farmers and other interested parties investigated the soil life with the help of buried underpants throughout Switzerland and thus explored the biodiversity in the soil.

With the help of interested citizens, a database for the as yet unedited letters from the Bullinger correspondence from 1548 onwards was set up and made available to researchers.

Using a participatory approach, the first steps towards a "Züri begrünt" web app were initiated, a simple tool for the realization of greening projects with the aim of improving the urban climate and quality of life.

App'Ailes d'Air planned to equip a network of paragliders with low-cost, open-source instruments to measure atmospheric and air pollution parameters.

Through participatory action research with young people, their parents, teachers and pediatricians, opportunities, risks and new ways of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic are explored.

This project was about the implementation and analysis of the first health questionnaire in Switzerland co-designed by people with MS.

Outdoor athletes are involved in the collection of measurement data to enable better forecasting.

An online storytelling initiative that documents and shares online stories of cancer survivors around the world.

How can the theological language and action skills of volunteer church leaders be fostered so that church leadership in partnership can be realized?

The project used participatory approaches to reduce knowledge gaps about the situations of refugee children and youth, for a diverse, public, and practice-based discussion.

The inhabitants of the city of Winterthur discussed their experienced quality of life in a virtual process. Future scenarios were then designed in a participatory manner and measures were developed to achieve the target system.

What are environmental interests and needs of the citizens of Zurich? Citizens' perspective on environmental aspects of urban development in Zurich.

The project aims at documenting, illustrating and communicating bioethical concepts that have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare ourselves for similar situations that are bound to occur in the future.

The topic of this cultural studies research project is tradition in modern channels. It examines the attribution and claiming of folk culture (folklore) in relation to folk music programs on Swiss television.

The University Research Priority Programs (URPP) at UZH explores the social conditions and consequences of parenthood, involving citizens in various steps of the research process.

At the University Research Priority Program (URPP) Dynamics of Healthy Aging, researchers examine the stabilisation of psychological health and quality of life at low, intermediate and high levels of functioning from middle adulthood to advanced old age.

Citizen Science for monitoring climate impacts and achieving climate resilience.

The project supported sustainable institutional changes to promote Citizen Science in science and technology.

The project established Citizen Science hubs in European research performing and funding organisations to drive institutional change.

This project helped to optimize toxic speech detection algorithms which used machine learning and sentiment analysis.

A research project from the University of Zurich and the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Grisons.

Videos from camera traps were evaluated by dedicated citizen scientists to investigate the occurrence of weasels and their prey in the Swiss Midlands.

The purpose of MitrendS is to discover new information about symptoms and physical limitations in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. Healthy people can participate and collect baseline and comparative data by using a tablet app designed for this purpose.

Citizen scientists transcribed the approximately 1700 handwritten Wenker sheets an translated the 40 sentences into today’s dialects.

The project investigated if Hate Speech is also used in private correspondence by analysing WhatsApp texts provided by the public.

Based on Citizen scientists' classification of images of snakes, tools were created to identify snakes.

Researchers from the ETH and UZH initiated the “Swiss Cause of Health Cohort” to promote the concept of sharing personal data for research.