Appointment: Nora Markwalder

Prof. Dr. Nora Markwalder studied law at the Faculté de droit, des sciences criminelles et d'administration publique of the University of Lausanne from 2000 to 2005. After obtaining her law degree, she completed a second degree at the Institute of Forensic Science and Criminology at the University of Lausanne, from which she graduated with a Master's degree in 2007. As part of the mobility opportunities offered by this degree programme, she attended two semesters at the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville Texas (USA). From 2007 to 2012, she was a research assistant at Prof. Dr. Martin Killias' Chair of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminology at the University of Zurich, where she received her doctorate summa cum laude in 2012. She then worked as an auditor and court clerk at the Dielsdorf District Court. In October 2014, she was admitted to the bar of the Canton of Zurich and worked as a lawyer in a Zurich law firm specialising in criminal law. Since 1 April 2015 she has been Assistant Professor for Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminology at the University of St. Gallen; since 2018 she has been substitute for the Chair of Criminal Law at the University of St. Gallen. Nora Markwalder was habilitated by the Law School in the autumn of 2022. Prof. Dr Nora Markwalder is co-founder and director of the Competence Centre for Criminal Law and Criminology.

Research in the fields of commercial criminal law and criminology

Prof. Dr. Nora Markwalder's research activities at the University of St. Gallen include two main areas, namely classic criminal law and criminal procedure (with a particular focus on economic criminal law) on the one hand, and criminology on the other. She is one of only a handful of researchers in Europe and Switzerland to conduct both legal and empirical research in the legal sciences, covering a previously little-researched intersection between criminal law and criminal procedure and its application in real-world legal situations.

In her publications, she combines legal questions with empirical research to document how the law is applied in actual cases and, ultimately, to draw conclusions about how the law should be shaped. At the same time, Prof. Dr. Nora Markwalder also continues to conduct research with a classical legal approach, for example in legal commentaries or while dealing with questions of commercial and administrative criminal law. She is also active in classic criminological research areas, conducting victim surveys such as the Swiss Crime Survey 2022, research on homicides in Switzerland or experimental studies on various issues of the criminal justice process.

Prof. Dr. Nora Markwalder is the editor of the “Basler Kommentar VStrR” and editor-in-chief of the "New Journal of Criminology and Crime Policy". She is active in various academic associations, such as taking on the role of coordinator in the "European Homicide Monitor Steering Committee" and the "European Homicide Research Group”. She has conducted a large number of research projects as part of her research activities, which have been funded by federal and cantonal institutionsas well as scientific funding programmes such as the Swiss National Science Foundation.