Seed Grants

PRC Seed Grants provide an excellent opportunity for population researchers at UZH. These grants aim to foster innovation, encourage collaboration, and support early-stage projects in population research. Individual grants of CHF 10'000 to 20'000 are available for a variety of project-related expenses.

To learn more about eligibility, application requirements, and the submission process, please refer to the detailed PDF document.

PRC Seed Grants (PDF, 178 KB)

Access the slides (PDF, 809 KB) from the Seed Grants Information Session held on June 6, 2024.

Since October 2025, the UZH PRC supports four new innovative and interdisciplinary projects in population research.

Dominik Menges (Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute), 
Michelle Möri (Department of Communication and Media Research)

Being diagnosed with cancer and undergoing treatment has a long-lasting impact on those affected. Given the increasing population of people living with and beyond cancer in Switzerland and worldwide, population-based research in this area is critical. One of the aims of such research is to include a representative sample of those affected to draw solid conclusions and to inform policy and practice. At the same time, those living with and beyond cancer have very diverse experiences – while some draw strength from being a cancer survivor and supporting others with the diagnosis, others face social, occupational, physical, mental, or financial difficulties and stigmatization. To capture these diverse experiences and needs, it is critical to use clear, person-centered, sensitive communication strategies in research. In addition, social media can be a supportive platform for building a community of research participants and communicating science to the public.

To date, there is little evidence on the success factors and challenges of how to effectively engage those living with and beyond cancer in population-based research. Furthermore, there is little evidence about how social media can be effectively used in research to ensure high engagement, relevance, and communication with the public. This project aims to address this critical gap by identifying success factors and developing effective and tailored approaches to recruit and engage people living with and beyond cancer in population-based research.

Through key informant interviews with diverse key stakeholders, this project will identify success factors and challenges in communication for effective participant recruitment, continued engagement, and social media strategies in population-based research on cancer survivorship. In this process, we will involve people living with and beyond cancer alongside patient organizations, cancer leagues, cancer survivorship researchers, population researchers, and cancer storytellers. Through citizen science co-creation workshops, we will then co-develop recommendations and a concrete communication and social media strategy (communication toolkit) covering the full population research lifecycle. This will help to involve harder-to-reach populations in research, include diverse perspectives, communicate findings back to participants, and build a community among people living with and beyond cancer.

Sintieh Ekongefeyin (Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care),
Phung Lang (Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute) 

Rationale
Digital transformation is a global public health priority, enabling more efficient clinical workflows, data-driven policymaking, and real-time public health surveillance. The Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) actively promotes the digitization of health records, including the integration of vaccination records into national electronic health systems such as the Electronic Patient Dossier. Vaccination remains one of the most effective public health interventions, preventing an estimated 4–5 million deaths globally each year. However, vaccination records in Switzerland remain largely paper-based, handwritten, and variable in format, making them susceptible to damage,loss or transcription errors. This limits their use in clinical decision-making and public health surveillance.

To address this gap, we propose digitizing vaccination cards of children as initial step and to explore whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including large language (LLMs) and deep learning techniques, can transform unstructured handwritten health records into structured digital information suitable for research, clinical use and public health surveillance.

Aim
Overall, we aim to build and evaluate a tool that extracts key immunization information from current Swiss vaccination cards and exports the results in interoperable, standards-compliant formats.

Specifically, we aim to:

1. Develop and pilot a pipeline that converts images of the current Swiss paediatric vaccination cards (in German) into machine-readable HL7 FHIR format.
2. Assess the accuracy, reliability and robustness of the digitization process using a representative set of vaccination cards.
3. Create the foundations for a high-quality dataset of digitized vaccination records, annotated for key immunization features that could be used to support surveillance, monitor vaccination coverage trends, and inform evidence-based immunization policies in Switzerland.

Expected outcome
This project will deliver a pilot of an AI pipeline that supports healthcare providers in improving patient care and enables public health authorities to conduct more accurate, real-time vaccination surveillance. It will also provide a reuseable dataset and methodological framework that can serve as an invaluable resource and foundation for interdisciplinary population research and future digital transformation initiatives in health data management.

Team and partnerships
This project is a collaboration between the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute (EBPI) and the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care (IfIS). The Immunity & Vaccines Group (EBPI) contributes expertise on vaccination practices and access to representative card formats. The Digital & Mobile Health group (IfIS) leads the development, implementation and secure deployment of the AI model.

Tabea Hässler (Department of Psychology, University of Zurich),
 Sophie Stephan (Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich), 
Martin Gramc (URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded | H2R; European University Institute), 
Clarissa Janousch (Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, University of Zurich; University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm)),
 Lea Babette Winter (Department of Adult Psychiatry and Psychotherapy University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich), 
Léïla Eisner (Psychologisches Institut & Schweizer LGBTIQ+ Panel)

Despite significant progress in recognizing the rights and societal acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) people, substantial social and legal inequalities continue to affect LGBTIQ+ communities worldwide. LGBTIQ+ people still encounter prejudice, discrimination, and systemic inequalities that hinder their access to essential services, including proper healthcare and legal protections. In some regions, they face criminalization and pathologization, which further exacerbate their vulnerabilities. These persistent social and legal injustities undermine fundamental human rights, negatively impact health and well-being, and hinder global efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals—particularly those related to good health, gender equality, justice, strong institutions, and reducing inequalities.

Research highlighting the detrimental effects of social and legal inequalities on LGBTIQ+ people has been instrumental in depathologizing and decriminalizing the community, fostering greater awareness and prompting policy reforms. Nonetheless, enacting and implementing legal changes is a lengthy process, and currently, the LGBTIQ+ community faces a global anti-LGBTIQ+ movement threatening the rights that have been hard-won over years of advocacy. This underscores the urgent need to deepen our understanding of how best to support LGBTIQ+ people within their diverse regional contexts, recognizing the unique challenges each faces.

For many in the LGBTIQ+ community—who frequently confront prejudice, social rejection, and feelings of loneliness and social isolation—building and strengthening resilience and social support networks is therefore vital. Historically, the LGBTIQ+ community has built strong networks of social connection both within the community and through allies, providing education, counseling, healthcare, and support systems that promote a sense of belonging, resilience, and improved health outcomes. In the present project, we aim to better understand how these culturally-centered support systems can promote the belonging, health, and well-being of LGBTIQ+ people.

Building upon the SNSF-funded global LGBTIQ+ health project (led by Tabea Hässler) with over 100 scholars from more than 60 countries, we aim to explore how various factors—individual, group-related, and structural—affect the health and well-being of LGBTIQ+ people across different contexts worldwide. 

As a diverse group of scholars committed to transdisciplinary research, our goals are to:

1. Foster sustainable collaboration within the University of Zurich and with scholars, practitioners, and key institutions around the globe.
2. Advance the emerging field of global LGBTIQ+ health by bringing together experts from diverse disciplines.
3. Enhance understanding of health and well-being by integrating theories of minority stress and social support.
4. Examine similarities and differences in experiences of discrimination and social support among various subgroups, considering intersecting identities such as race, ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic status.
5. Generate practical insights to inform targeted interventions and policies that aim to reduce health disparities and promote equity within LGBTIQ+ communities.

Through this work, we hope to contribute to creating a more inclusive and equitable world where all people can enjoy optimal health and well-being, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or intersex status.

Saskia De Gani (Careum), 
Felix Gille (University of Zurich, Digital Society Initiative and Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care) 

The digital transformation strongly influences how people nowadays seek, understand, critically reflect and use health information. Online platforms, such as search engines, but also social media channels, AI-based tools and chatbots as well as health apps have become central sources of health information. However, the vast amount of digital content and its varying quality pose major challenges to our population. Mis- and disinformation and commercially driven content can mislead users, erode trust in health systems and even cause harm and negative health outcomes. In this context, the population needs certain skills and competencies to deal with this challenge. On the other hand, there need to be systemic approaches to support the population in managing the complex health information ecosystem. The Swiss Health Literacy Survey 2019–2021 revealed that around 72 % of adults in Switzerland report low levels of digital health literacy, especially regarding their ability to judge the reliability and commercial intent of online health information. Yet, little is known about which digital platforms the public actually uses, how they use them and how much they trust them.

Thus, this project aims to generate first representative data on the use and trust of online platforms for health information among adults living in Switzerland. The study is part of a trinational initiative led by Bertelsmann Stiftung, Careum Stiftung and Gesundheit Österreich GmbH to inform the development of an international certification model that highlights trustworthy providers of digital health information. 

Specifically, the study seeks to answer:

1. What role do online platforms (including search engines, social media, and AI tools) play in informing health-related decisions?
2. How trustworthy are these different digital sources perceived to be?
3. Who does the public see as responsible for ensuring the quality of online health information?

A national online survey with a representative sample of around 2’000 adult residents of Switzerland is conducted. The applied questionnaire is based on the validated HL-DIGI instrument, adapted to explore trust and platform use. Data collection will be carried out by a professional survey institute. Statistical analyses will include descriptive and comparative approaches and cross-national comparisons with parallel studies in Germany and Austria.

The project will provide crucial evidence on how people in Switzerland navigate the digital information landscape when it comes to health. Its findings will contribute to developing data-informed recommendations to strengthen digital health literacy at population level, to combat mis- and disinformation, and supports international efforts to establish quality and trust standards for online health information.

Since March 2025, the UZH PRC supports two new innovative and interdisciplinary projects in population research.

Prof. Dr. Kaspar Staub  (Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich),
PD Dr. Tilo Burkhard (Department of Obstetrics, University Hospital Zurich),
Prof. Dr. Katja Rost (Institute of Sociology and URPP "Human Reproduction Reloaded", University of Zurich)

In recent years, declining birth rates have been the focus of attention in many parts of the world. Although some countries (such as Switzerland) experienced a short-term increase in births during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, many European countries have experienced a significant decline in birth rates, continuing a negative trend that began before the pandemic. Recently, birth trends for Switzerland up to and including 2022 have been analysed and published using the Swiss Federal Statistical Office's BevNat birth statistics. However, the study was conducted at the population level, with limited depth of variables and only cursory subgroup analysis. As elsewhere in Europe, recent trends are therefore only partially understood and it is not clear which population subgroups are particularly affected by the decline in births and why. It would be beneficial to have more evidence on this, as the issue of the declining birth rate is expected to continue to receive increasing attention in general and in Switzerland, including from the authorities and the public (media). In addition, clinicians are also confronted with the issue, as the decline is already noticeable in practice.

The PRC Seed Grant project is designed to start at an early stage to address the above research gaps in an innovative way. It has the following three main objectives:

1. To update the analysis of BevNat data up to 2024, to extend the subgroup analysis and to establish the basis for continuous monitoring in the coming years.

2. Explore the possibility of triangulating the BevNat data with data from the USZ Obstetrics Clinic, the medical statistics of all Swiss hospitals from the FSO, and other data sets on births and attitudes that provide additional variables for a better understanding of ongoing trends.

3. Write a scientific publication and develop the framework for a larger funding application bringing together different disciplines in the context of the PRC.

Andrew Hall  (Institute of Anatomy and Zurich Kidney Center), 
Annalise Baines (Department of Communication and Media Research), 
Kathrin Johanna Meier (Zurich Kidney Center)

Kidney disease is a growing public health crisis, affecting more than 10% of the Swiss population. Despite its significant impact on the healthcare system, economy, and environment, awareness of kidney disease remains low, primarily because it is a "silent killer" with symptoms often appearing only after a substantial amount of kidney function has been lost. Without early detection and intervention, kidney disease can progress to kidney failure, requiring dialysis or transplantation. Given the projected 30% rise in kidney disease-related healthcare costs by 2032 and its expected ranking as the fifth leading cause of death by 2040, urgent action is needed to enhance awareness and prevention strategies.

This research project, a collaboration between the Zurich Kidney Center (ZKC) at the University of Zurich (UZH) and the UZH Department of Communication and Media Research, seeks to develop effective digital strategies to raise awareness about kidney disease among high-risk groups. The primary target audience includes adults aged 25-60 from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and ethnic minorities, who are disproportionately affected by kidney disease due to risk factors such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and smoking. Despite being among those who would benefit most from early intervention, these groups often face barriers to accessing and understanding health information due to limited digital literacy, language barriers, and social marginalization in digital spaces.

The objective of this study is to investigate how individuals in high-risk populations engage with health-related information online. By understanding their preferred communication channels - whether social media, traditional media, or peer networks - the project aims to design targeted digital health campaigns that are both accessible and impactful. The study will explore key challenges, such as distrust in online health resources, digital exclusion, and low health literacy, to inform more effective kidney health awareness initiatives in Switzerland.

The project will employ semi-structured interviews with 30 to 50 participants from disadvantaged groups to gather qualitative insights into their experiences accessing and using online health information. Participants will be recruited through healthcare facilities, community centers, nonprofit organizations, and social media platforms. The interviews will focus on their digital media habits, perceptions of online health content, and trust in digital health information. Additionally, a short demographic survey will be administered to collect data on age, gender, education level, employment status, and internet usage.

Expected outcomes include an improved understanding of how high-risk populations engage with digital health information and their content preferences. These findings will be used to develop actionable recommendations for designing effective digital kidney health campaigns. Furthermore, insights from this study will serve as a foundation for future funding applications to support large-scale awareness initiatives in Switzerland. By leveraging real-world data, this project aims to create sustainable, evidence-based strategies that enhance early detection and treatment of kidney disease, ultimately improving public health outcomes.

Since September 2024, the UZH PRC supports three new innovative and interdisciplinary projects in population research.

Dr. Andrea Farnham (Department of Public and Global Health, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute),
Dr. Walter Bierbauer (Psychologisches Institut, Angewandte Sozial- und Gesundheitspsychologie)

The PlanetHealth project aims to address the environmental impact of travel through an interdisciplinary "Planetary Health" approach within the field of travel medicine, combining the expertise of behavioral psychology, epidemiology, and clinicians. Sustainable travel practices, such as the judicious use of antibiotics, proper disposal of medications, being fully vaccinated, using eco-friendly mosquito prevention and sun protection methods, and staying in environmentally conscious accommodations, are crucial in mitigating the impact of travel on environmental pollution and the spread of antibiotic resistance. The PlanetHealth project investigates behavioral patterns, modifiable beliefs, and self-regulatory factors that influence travelers' decisions around travel and aims to promote more sustainable behaviors, as well as identify why certain unsustainable practices prevail (e.g., higher costs). PlanetHealth will develop and implement a quantitative, cross-sectional survey in the travel clinics of Zurich and Australia to gather data on the health and travel behaviors of travelers. The study results will then be disseminated at an interdisciplinary workshop involving travel medicine experts, psychologists, and implementation scientists. The workshop will focus on translating the study’s findings into practical, feasible interventions that can be integrated into travel medicine practice.

Dr. Clarissa Janousch (University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, Experimental Pharmacopsychology and Psychological Addiction Research),
Dr. Laura Bechtiger  (Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, Risk and Resilience)

The rising youth mental health crisis, characterized by higher levels of internalizing symptoms in more recent cohorts of adolescents, especially adolescent girls, has inspired novel research into understanding its potential drivers and causes. The examined factors have been manifold, ranging from the rise of social media to sexual violence exposure to macroeconomic factors, and these studies typically identified mixed findings for many indicators. Important determinants of mental distress that have received less attention in this context of explaining secular changes are health-risk behaviors. Yet, health-risk behaviors, such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, substance use (e.g., alcohol, smoking, cannabis use), and risky sexual behavior are important determinants of individual mental distress and are known to differ between males and females. Since some evidence suggests secular trends also exist in health-risk behaviors, secular changes in health behavior profiles over the past two decades need to be systematically examined in relation to changes in mental distress. Thus, the main aim of this project, which holds significant implications for understanding and addressing the youth mental health crisis, is to bridge diverse and interdisciplinary research fields on health-risk behaviors, mental health, and their social determinants to describe patterns and determinants of health-risk behaviors and mental distress across different countries and time. To this end, we will leverage data from the publicly available Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, an internationally standardized, repeated cross-sectional survey of adolescents from the general population in over 40 countries across Europe and North America. Understanding these patterns and determinants could inform the development of targeted public health interventions aimed at reducing health-risk behaviors and mitigating their impact on adolescent mental health, ultimately helping to address the broader youth mental health crisis.

Dr. Markus Wolf  (Department of Psychology),
Dr. Oliver Grübner  (Department of Geography),
Dr. Eileen Neumann (Department of Adult Psychiatry and Psychotherapy),
Nico Pfiffner (Department of Communication andMedia Research; Digital Donation Lab)

Traumatic exposure during political or economic upheavals, health pandemics, natural disasters, or war, are serious threats to a person’s mental health and can have long-lasting negative effects on a population level. Social media and other digital sources used by affected individuals are opening a window into individual’s real live and provide new prospects on risk and protective factors including psychological resources, resilience and coping strategies in times of crisis and beyond. Because these factors are idiosyncratic and dynamic in nature, they are not well-addressed by population science’s classical tool-box. Digging into to this digital sphere – for instance by analyzing activities in popular social media (e.g. Telegram) by Ukrainian residents during the war – offers unprecedented opportunities for population health research.
Accessing this data source, however, is still a major challenge. This is where our project starts. Citizen science initiatives have proposed data donations as a way of accessing such data sources. Recently, the UZH Data Donation Lab (DDL) has developed the Data Donation Module (DDM), a web-module that allows the secure retrieval and processing of individual digital data donations. The DDM processes data such as user-generated web content, social media activity or content, or (passive) smartphone data, all of which have the potential to provide new and unobtrusive insights into a person’s (mental) health.
In our project we aim to develop an interface and data pipeline for digital donations to be attached to large scale population surveys – such as the PRC’s Mental Health Surveillance in Ukraine project (MAP) – to complement structured survey data with unstructured digital data. More specifically, our project has the following goals:

1. Develop a prototype digital data donation pipeline to collect social media and digital behavioral data by the means of individual data donations alongside classical surveys (e.g., Red Cap).
2. Assess participants’ attitudes towards digital data donations for the purpose of detection of real-life mental health distress and resilience.
3. Empirically validate a Ukrainian version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary to extract standard language features, e.g. emotional tone, from text-based data donations; LIWC is one of the best validated and most widely used dictionary-based text analysis programs worldwide and available in multiple languages, which allows its use across various countries and languages.

Digital epidemiological data has the potential to enrich survey-based structured health data allowing in-situ insights into individuals’ everyday lives, behaviors and health conditions based on their digital activities, contents and traces. Combining structured survey data with unstructured naturalistic data retrieved from the persons’ digital devices offers exciting new prospects for data enrichment in population research. The module developed in this project will be a starting point to use individual data donations in PRC projects and future multilingual population studies.

Since January 2024, the UZH PRC supports three innovative and collaborative projects in population research. All projects address health issues in different age groups.

PD Dr. Michael von Rhein (University Children's Hospital Zurich) 
Prof. Boris Quednow (Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich)
Dr. Holger Dressel (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute)
Corina S. Rüegg (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute)
Prof. Oskar Jenni (University Children's Hospital Zurich)

In recent years, the number of children with special educational needs has increased significantly - both in elementary school and in early childhood. Obviously, more children than before have a global developmental delay, a language development disorder, an autism spectrum disorder, ADHD or other behavioral problems. This can be partly explained by medical advances: Thanks to improved medical care, many more children with significant risk factors (such as children with congenital heart defects or former premature babies) survive today than 20 years ago. These children are more likely to have developmental disorders or disabilities than children without such risks. However, these factors cannot fully explain the increase in numbers. Other possible explanations include changes in biological and environmental risk factors. Recently, a number of environmental toxins and pollutants have been suspected of having negative effects on health and development. An increase in parental consumption of medication and psychoactive substances could also be considered as a possible cause. Negative influences on early childhood development have also been described through experiences of social deprivation, psychosocial trauma or social isolation. However, systematic studies on the etiology of developmental disorders are rare, particularly regarding modifiable or even avoidable causes. We therefore plan to perform an umbrella review on environmental factors, drugs and toxins as risk factors for developmental delay in children, which will lay the grounds for clinical studies targeting specific factors potentially causing developmental disorders in early childhood.

PD Dr. Cesar Hincapié  (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute [EBPI], Balgrist University Hospital – University Spine Centre Zurich [UWZH])
Prof. Thomas Friemel  (Department of Communication and Media Research)

Collaborators: Dr. Léonie Hofstetter, Nathalie Schweyckart, Dr. Christian Brand, Prof. Mazda Farshad, Prof. Milo Puhan, Prof. Laura Rosella
 
The challenge
Total hip arthroplasty (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are standard surgical procedures in Switzerland. The Swiss National Joint Registry (SIRIS) captures data on over 95% of these surgeries annually—approximately 22,000 THAs and 18,000 TKAs per year. Despite the typical lifespan of joint replacements being 25 years on average, a small proportion requires premature revision surgery imposing significant challenges for both patients and the healthcare system. Clinical prediction modeling and effective public communication of surgical outcomes is paramount for decision-making, encompassing perspectives from patients, surgeons, hospitals, and the health system. While clinical prediction models are proliferating, the optimal practices for communicating their results to the public and other stakeholders remain unclear.
 
The opportunity
This project presents a unique opportunity to leverage clinical prediction models for improved decision-making in total joint arthroplasty. These models may offer valuable insights into the risks and probable outcomes of THA and TKA, enhancing preoperative shared decision-making for all stakeholders. The incorporation of Bayesian belief networks may hold promise in identifying causal links between presurgical factors and outcomes, potentially serving as decision support tools to enhance communication between patients and surgeons. By incorporating end-user perspectives and facilitating public communication of these decision support tools, our project aims to foster transparency, build trust, and empower individuals to actively engage in their healthcare decisions.
 
Overall aim
The overarching aim of our project is to advance understanding of prediction modeling and public health communication concerning patient-reported outcomes and revision surgery after THA and TKA, using population-based SIRIS data and qualitative approaches.
 
Specific objectives
1.   To develop and validate prediction models for patient outcomes (health-related quality of life, pain intensity, and satisfaction) one year after THA and TKA.
2.   To develop and validate prediction models for premature revision surgery within 5 years after THA and TKA.
3.   To identify predictors of patient outcomes and revision surgery after THA and TKA using Bayesian belief networks as a clinical decision support tool.
4.   To qualitatively describe and assess the effects of public health communication related to prediction modelling on patients, surgeons, hospitals, and the health system.

We had a fantastic Seed Grants Symposium on Friday, June 20, 2025!
From 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, all eight research projects funded by a PRC Seed Grant were presented in brief 10-minute sessions, each followed by interactive Q&A discussions.

The event was open to all and offered a great opportunity to learn more about these innovative and interdisciplinary population-based research projects.

For more details, click here