This year, the SWISSED brings together practitioners and academics, by presenting two inspiring keynote lectures from celebrated industry and  scientific leaders.

It is our great pleasure to introduce the keynote speakers for this year’s SWISSED:

Udo Scheff (PhD) has been the Vice President Engineering for the Small and Mid Tractor series at John Deere since 2023. In this function, he has global overall responsibility for the vehicle engineering and program management of the tractor product families with development locations in India, China, USA, Mexico, Brazil, France and Germany.
Udo was born in Holstein, Northern Germany. After completing an apprenticeship and graduating from high school, he studied mechanical engineering with a focus on engineering design and machine dynamics at Leibnitz University in Hanover and Michigan Technological University. He received his doctorate degree in 2010 from the Technical University of Braunschweig.
In 1999, Udo began his professional career at the John Deere works in Mannheim as a development engineer in the field of chassis engineering. After various positions in product development, he was entrusted with overall technical responsibility for the new 6R series in 2006. From 2012 he held various management positions at John Deere in Waterloo (USA) before taking on the role of Engineering Manager for the Global Mid Tractor series at John Deere in Mannheim, Germany, in 2018.
Due to his many years of professional experience in the field of agricultural machinery, he has in-depth engineering experience at the component, module, system, vehicle and architecture level.
 

Tobias Luthe (PhD) is an academic transdisciplinary hybrid. He was originally trained as MSc forest scientist, with majors in environmental economics, wood technology and passive house design, and holds a 2nd Masters in education on sustainability. His PhD is in social-ecological resilience of mountain systems.
At ETH Zurich, Tobias is Program Director of the learning program “Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems”, containing a global free-access massive open online course series, and an executive Master of Advanced Studies in Regenerative Systems.
He leads the ETH Systemic Design Labs group who offers the DRRS program. Tobias is Associate Professor for Systemic Design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway, and co-founding Director of the MonViso Institute in the Italian Alps, a living systems lab, a real-world mountain laboratory for sustainability transitions and regenerative design, and a bioregional weaving hub. At MVI, Tobias designed and built the passive net-positive “regenerator” house Il Doppio. He co-founded Grown, a design-as-nature lab and experience collective, winning industry awards for bio composites, such as inventing the first hemp bio-composite skis.
Tobias is a mountaineering guide and photographer and leads the Mountain Resilience Group at the Mountain Research Initiative, hosted at the University of Berne.