Developing Academic Relationships
CROWN is building research relationships with two of Europe’s most respected universities. These emerging collaborations are designed to provide the academic rigour, methodological expertise, and engineering capacity that CROWN’s mission requires — and to offer our academic partners access to novel research questions, real-world applications, and data infrastructure that advances their own scholarly agendas.
University of Geneva
Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences Status: In active dialogue
The Developing Relationship
The Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Geneva is one of Switzerland’s leading research faculties and a member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). Researchers at the faculty focus on discrimination, prejudice, and social identity — the academic domain at the heart of CROWN’s CROWN Discrimination Index (CDI).
CROWN is in active dialogue with the University of Geneva on the CDI’s design, validation, and deployment:
Survey instrument development. The proposed collaboration envisions the University of Geneva providing academic oversight of the CDI survey instrument — its item construction, psychometric properties, and alignment with established measurement frameworks in discrimination research. The instrument builds on validated scales including the Everyday Discrimination Scale and the Perceived Racism Scale, adapted and extended for European contexts and the specific domain of appearance-based discrimination.
Methodology and validation. The CDI’s methodology — including the novel calibration of survey data against hardware-verified diagnostic data — draws on methodological expertise at the University of Geneva. This approach is designed to ensure that the methodology meets the standards required for publication in peer-reviewed journals, acceptance as evidence in policy deliberation, and adoption by other researchers.
Pilot study oversight. The CDI pilot study, currently in progress, is developed in consultation with the University of Geneva. The pilot validates the survey instrument, tests the feasibility of the hardware calibration protocol, and produces preliminary CDI scores for an initial European sample.
Cross-cultural validation. As the CDI expands beyond its initial Swiss and French pilot populations, the proposed collaboration would address the measurement invariance challenges inherent in cross-national discrimination research — ensuring that CDI scores are meaningfully comparable across languages, cultures, and national contexts.
What This Relationship Would Enable
A formalised collaboration with the University of Geneva would give CROWN’s research programme the academic foundation it requires. The CDI is not a commercial survey tool — it is a scientific instrument that must withstand the scrutiny of peer reviewers, the standards of institutional review boards, and the evidentiary requirements of courts and legislatures. A formal partnership with the University of Geneva would ensure that it does.
For the University of Geneva, the collaboration would open a novel research domain: the intersection of psychometric measurement, biometric technology, and anti-discrimination law — a field in which the CDI represents a first-of-its-kind instrument.
ETH Zürich
Department of Biosensors and Bioelectronics Status: In advanced discussions
The Developing Relationship
CROWN is in advanced discussions with a professor in the department of biosensors and bioelectronics at ETH Zürich — consistently ranked among the world’s top five universities — regarding the supervision of student projects on CROWN’s multi-sensor diagnostic device. ETH Zürich’s strength in engineering, materials science, and bioelectronics makes it an ideal institutional partner for the hardware challenges that CROWN’s diagnostic technology presents.
The proposed collaboration is envisaged to advance through progressive levels of complexity:
Semester projects (3-6 months). Well-scoped engineering challenges within the diagnostic device’s multi-sensor architecture. Examples: optimisation of the optical micro-imaging module for fibre diameter measurement at 0.1 micrometre precision; integration of impedance sensing for porosity index quantification; calibration protocols for near-infrared spectroscopy in the 900-1700nm range.
Master theses (6 months). Comprehensive projects addressing the full multi-modal classification challenge — building and validating the AI system that integrates optical, spectroscopic, and electrical data into a unified CROWN Hair DNA profile. These projects involve the complete engineering pipeline from sensor data acquisition through signal processing to machine learning classification.
Pioneer Fellowship pathway. ETH Zürich’s Pioneer Fellowship programme provides CHF 150,000 over 18 months for the commercialisation of technologies developed at ETH. CROWN’s diagnostic device, if developed through the proposed semester project and master thesis pipeline, would represent a natural candidate for this pathway — providing the funding and institutional support to take the technology from laboratory prototype to deployable research instrument.
What Students Gain
The CROWN diagnostic device presents a genuine, multi-disciplinary engineering challenge. Students working on the project gain:
A real-world, multi-sensor integration problem. The device combines optical micro-imaging, near-infrared spectroscopy, impedance sensing, and AI classification into a single platform. This is not a textbook exercise — it is a system-level engineering challenge with constraints (miniaturisation, cost, accuracy across all hair types) that demand creative solutions.
Direct social impact. The diagnostic device is the hardware foundation of CROWN’s entire research infrastructure. Data it generates feeds the CROWN Hair Commons, enables the CDI calibration, and supports legislative advocacy across Europe. Students can see the direct connection between their engineering work and real-world outcomes.
Publication potential. The novel combination of sensor modalities and the AI classification challenge (achieving equal accuracy across all ethnic hair types with limited initial training data) present publishable research contributions.
Commercialisation pathway. The Pioneer Fellowship provides a structured path from thesis to startup, should the student wish to pursue it.
Students interested in working on CROWN’s diagnostic technology can find project listings on SIROP or contact CROWN directly at contact@crown.ngo. Further details on the collaboration and open research questions are available on the ETH Partnership and Open Questions pages.
Expanding the Network
CROWN’s developing relationships with the University of Geneva and ETH Zürich represent the foundation of a research network that will expand as these collaborations are formalised and the programme matures. CROWN actively seeks collaborations with:
- Psychometric and social psychology researchers in additional European countries, for CDI cross-cultural validation and replication studies
- Materials science and bioelectronics groups with expertise in non-destructive hair fibre analysis
- Data science and privacy researchers specialising in privacy-preserving data aggregation for sensitive biometric data
- Clinical psychology researchers for validation of CROWN’s 360° Integrative Mind-Body Therapeutic Protocol
- Legal scholars working on anti-discrimination law, appearance-based discrimination, and the evidentiary use of composite indices
Academic researchers interested in collaboration are invited to review CROWN’s open research questions and contact us at contact@crown.ngo.
CROWN’s research relationships will be governed by formal collaboration agreements that define intellectual property rights, data sharing protocols, and publication rights in accordance with the policies of each partner institution. For partnership inquiries, contact contact@crown.ngo.