What we offer
Personalized Health Data Services
SIS supports the biomedical and personalized health research community of the ETH Domain and at national level as part of the BioMedIT network, with secure Data and IT solutions for confidential research data:
- Leonhard Med Platform as secure scientific Data & IT infrastructure
- secure HPC and coming soon, cloud compute
- secure data storage and backup with capacity in order of Petabytes
- FAIR data management for confidential data
- state-of-the-art data science and bioinformatics tools
- tools for interoperable and reproducible computational workflows
- security awareness training
Our current focus is on supporting the data driven biomedical research community in Switzerland.

National collaborations
We actively coordinate and align with the:
- Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN)
- Personalized Health and Related Technologies (PHRT)
- BioMedIT network (BioMedIT)
Leonhard Med Platform
Digital healthcare and biomedical research makes it now possible to collect large amounts of health-related data: clinical and -omics data, data from biobanks, and digital footprints collected by individuals themselves. Algorithmic analysis of such data makes in turn personalized health possible: prevention, diagnosis and treatment of unfavorable health conditions will become more precise for the benefit of the individuals and population at large.
Such large volume health-related data require secure and adequate Data & IT infrastructure for storage, computing and sharing.
For this, SIS builds Leonhard Med as a central high performance computing platform for research with confidential data, currently focused on biomedical applications.
Leonhard Med:
- is a new and powerful research IT platform to securely store, manage and process confidential research data
- supports collaborative, large-scale and very diverse biomedical research (including academies and hospitals) at ETH Zurich
- is part of the national BioMedIT network of secure data centers supporting projects in the SPHN and PHRT national programs
Service information: Scientific Compute Clusters Service Level Agreement

Compliance and Regulation
The following Leonhard Med Official Policies apply, effective May 1st, 2019
- The Acceptable Use Policy of the Leonhard Med secure High Performance Computing Infrastructure (RSETHZ 438.1)
- IT Security Guidelines for the Administration of Computer Systems within Leonhard Med (RSETHZ 438.3)
- IT Security Guidelines for ETH Zurich Leonhard Med Endpoints (RSETHZ 438.2)
At national level, the Swiss Laws and Policies for Data Protection apply
- Federal Act on Data Protection (SR 235.1)
- Human Research Act (SR 810.30)
- New (2018): SPHN Information Security Policy
- New (2018): SPHN Ethical Framework for Responsible Data Processing in Personalized Health Research
Links
Leonhard Med in the ETHZ inside|out newsletter, 19th issue, July 2019
ETHZ Blog Leonhard Med: Secure Scientific Platform for Confidential Data
SPHN - The BioMedIT Network: A Secure IT Platform for Research with Sensitive Human Data
Past Events
Leonhard Med Info Event - Scientific Data & IT Support for LOOP proposals
The Scientific IT Services of ETH Zurich and LOOP offered an info event on September 2nd 2020 for principal investigators and other potential applicants who are preparing research proposals for the current LOOP call.
If you did not have the opportunity to follow it live, you can see the recording here.
Further info: https://theloopzurich.ch/
Contact: Diana Coman Schmid, diana.coman@id.ethz.ch
Courses
- SPHN/BioMedIT Data Privacy and IT Security Training
- Research Data Management 4: Secure Handling of Confidential Research Data
Contact
Dr. Diana Coman Schmid
Service Manager
Personalized Health Data Services