Christian Simm

Christian Simm is the executive director of swissnex, a newly established exchange platform fostering cooperations and partnerships between Switzerland and Western North America in science and technology, education and entrepreneurship, and art and innovation. In December 1997, Simm opened the Swiss Science & Technology Office in San Francisco for the Western U.S.A. and Western Canada, which fosters high-level transatlantic exchanges in R&D, education and innovation. Thanks to extensive partnerships with the private and public sectors, he managed to grow the one-man operation into a larger team to develop SwissTalents, a network of highly skilled professionals living outside Switzerland, to establish a sophisticated information exchange platform and to organize a series of highly successful business networking events. The Swiss magazine Bilan listed him in the Who's Who of the Swiss Internet economy. Simm is the author of numerous articles in newspapers and magazines and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. Prior to his current position, he was director of CAST, a public-private partnership acting as Industrial Liaison Office for EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has kicked off various Swiss participations in European innovation and technology initiatives, co-founded a company active in process management, and was research group leader at Hydro-Québec in Montréal (Canada). Christian Simm holds a Ph.D. in physics and management degrees from IMD and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.