At the Federal Office of the Environment there will be Petra Zimmermann
In the summer, the 50-year-old manager will take over from Christine Hofmann after a long career in the public and private sectors in the fields of IT and sustainability
With the appointment of a new deputy director, the management of the Federal Office for the Environment FOEN is once again complete: Petra Zimmermann, a graduate in physics and an expert in digitization, will take over from Christine Hofmann, who retired at the end of January. The new deputy director will take up her duties in the summer of 2021.
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Petra Zimmermann will head the new pillar of the Directorate, which includes the IT, language service, resources and management areas of the FOEN, as well as the Environmental Monitoring Section and the Legal and International Affairs Divisions.
The new deputy director studied physics in Karlsruhe (Germany), with computer science, mathematics and mechanical engineering as her secondary subjects, and in 2005 completed a doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) on data analysis, artificial intelligence, graphical visualization and smart cities.
Four years as an official of Canton Aargau
From 2006 to 2010, she headed the Internet coordination department of the administration of the canton of Aargau. In this function, she was responsible for the development of the digital platform as well as the system integration for the entire website and intranet.
Parallel to a management education at the University of St. Gallen, she worked in the energy sector. From 2013 to 2017, she was actually a member of the management of Swiss Post where, as head of Information Technology, she oversaw the redesign of the IT architecture.
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In this role, she also addressed issues related to the workplace of the future, cloud technologies, and security management. In 2018 and 2019, Petra Zimmermann instead headed the digital unit of the multinational Vorwerk Group.
Since 2020, she has been a member of the team running Zurich Insurance’s Transformation & Technology division, within which she is responsible for enterprise architecture in the business, IT and data areas.
Petra Zimmermann, 50, has extensive management experience gained in different corporate cultures and has also worked in various industries on sustainability issues.
