Antonio Loprieno

Antonio Loprieno, born in 1955, completed high school at the European School in Brussels and studied Egyptology, Linguistics and Semitic Studies at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1977 with a doctorate and worked as an assistant until 1981. With a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he habilitated in 1984 at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. From 1984 he was an associate professor at the University of Perugia until he was appointed professor of Egyptology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989, where he also headed the Department of Near Eastern Languages ​​and Cultures until 2000. During this time he also held guest professorships at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg. Since 2000, Loprieno has been professor of Egyptology at the University of Basel, where he served as rector from 2006-15. His areas of research, in which he is identified through more than a hundred academic monographs and articles, are Egyptology and Semitic linguistics.

Loprieno was President of the Swiss Rectors' Conference (CRUS) from 2008-2015. Since May 2018, Loprieno has been President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and President of the European umbrella organization of the Academies of Arts and Sciences. In April 2018 he was elected Chairman of the Board of Governors at Jacobs University Bremen. Loprieno is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, the German Archaeological Institute and other internationally renowned scientific societies.