Anna Wirz-Justice PhD, Professor emeritus of the University of Basel, Switzerland, is a chronobiologist studying circadian and seasonal rhythms, sleep, and mood, and the physiological and psychological effects of light in health and illness. She introduced light therapy for winter depression in Europe and was a founding member of the Society for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms, the Daylight Academy, and the non-profit Center for Environmental Therapeutics. She now focuses on the applications of chronobiology in architecture and daily life. She has collaborated with artists and architects to seriously or playfully reimagine the luminous theses of rhythms, light, and life. A high point was to co-create and moderate a haute couture fashion show in Kyoto, themed on chronobiology and sleep, dressed in images of her own rest-activity cycle patterns.
Her scientific publications number more than 250, including a clinical manual on light therapy Chronotherapeutics for Affective Disorders (with F.Benedetti and M.Terman). Some of the artist collaborations have been documented: Daylight, a conversation with Olafur Eliasson in: Olafur Eliasson in Real Life, Tate Modern Exhibition Catalogue (2019); "The Waking Incubator”: exploring the interface between the performing arts and the science of sleep, eds. P.Gander & S.Trubridge, International Journal of Science and Society 2 (2011) 291-308; The biology of light and dark, in: “Slow Light, S. Appelt, exhibition in the Wachau, Austria (2015). She will co-curate an exhibition LIGHTEN UP: Inside the Biology of Time at the EPFL Pavilions Lausanne in Spring 2023.