Switzerland strengthens its position in international research infrastructures

ACTRIS is a pan-European research infrastructure dedicated to the study of aerosols, clouds and trace gases – key components in understanding climate, air quality and human health. Through a network of observational platforms and laboratories across Europe, ACTRIS provides high-quality data to advance knowledge of atmospheric processes and support environmental policymaking.

In Switzerland, ACTRIS brings together major institutions such as the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), MeteoSwiss, ETH Zurich and the University of Bern. Observational platforms at Jungfraujoch, Payerne and Beromünster as well as calibration and simulation laboratories, thus enabling atmospheric processes to be studied in a wide range of different contexts, from controlled laboratory conditions to high-altitude alpine sites.

CLARIN provides simple and reliable access to a wide range of language data and tools that allow datasets to be studied, analysed or combined, in particular to facilitate research in the humanities and social sciences.

Switzerland’s participation is coordinated through the CLARIN-CH consortium, which is hosted at the University of Zurich. CLARIN-CH brings together leading academic institutions – including the University of Basel, the University of Bern, the University of Geneva, the University of Fribourg, the University of Lausanne, the University of Neuchâtel, the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) and the Zürcher Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften (ZHAW) – as well as national infrastructures such as the Linguistic Research Infrastructure (LiRI) and the Language Repository of Switzerland (LaRS), which draw their data from the national repository SWISSUbase.

Established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in January 2025, the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) aims to explore gamma rays from space with unprecedented precision. Once it becomes operational, the observatory will deploy around sixty telescopes across two sites: the island of La Palma (Spain) and the Atacama Desert (Chile). The approximately twelve petabytes of data expected to be generated annually will be processed in Zeuthen (Germany). The organisation’s headquarters are located in Bologna (Italy) and one of its four decentralised data processing centres will be hosted by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano.

Switzerland will contribute EUR 7.7 million to the construction of the observatory, which is expected to be completed by 2030. This investment will enhance Switzerland’s position in gamma-ray astronomy, astroparticle physics and multi-messenger astronomy, while also consolidating national expertise in data science.

Since 2001, the European Social Survey (ESS) has regularly collected cross-national data about attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in over 30 European countries. The data are freely available and provide academics, policymakers and civil society with reliable information for research and policymaking.

Switzerland is represented by the national coordination team at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS). This enables analysis of societal developments in Switzerland in a European context, raises the international profile of Swiss social research and facilitates the country’s integration into an established research network.