New Vice Director at Bafu
The Federal Office for the Environment has a new deputy director: Petra Zimmermann, a physicist and digitization specialist, succeeds Christine Hofmann, who retired at the end of January. The new deputy director will take up the post in summer 2021.
Petra Zimmermann takes over the newly designed directorate area with responsibility for IT, language service, resources and business administration at the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN). She is also head of the Environmental Monitoring Section and the two divisions Legal and International Affairs.
Petra Zimmermann studied physics with minors in computer science, mathematics and mechanical engineering in Karlsruhe (D) and received her PhD in Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Visualization and Smart Cities from ETH Zurich in 2005. From 2006 to 2010, she headed the Internet Coordination Office of the Aargau Cantonal Administration. In this role, she built the canton's digital platform and was responsible for system integration for the entire web presence and intranet.
Broad leadership experience
Parallel to further management training at the University of St. Gallen, she then worked in the energy industry. In 2013-2017, she was a member of the Executive Board Information Technology Post at Swiss Post and redesigned the IT architecture. 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 headed the digital unit of the global Vorwerk Group. Since 2020, she has been a member of the Transformation & Technology management team at Zurich Insurance. In this role, she is responsible for enterprise architecture in the areas of business, IT and data.
The 50-year-old Zimmermann has broad management experience in different corporate cultures and has also worked on sustainability issues in various areas.
Press release Bafu
