Claudia Rebeca Binder SignerClaudia R. Binder, a Swiss, Canadian and Colombian citizen, was born in Montreal and spent most of her childhood in Switzerland and Colombia. She studied at ETH Zurich from 1985 to 1996, earning a degree in biochemistry and then a PhD in environmental sciences. After conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of Maryland in the US from 1996 to 1998, she returned to Switzerland and took a position as a senior research scientist at ETH Zurich, studying the interaction between human and environmental systems at the Institute for Natural and Social Science Interface. In 2006, Binder joined the University of Zurich as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and in 2009 moved to the University of Graz in Austria where she served as a full professor of systems science. In 2011, she took a position at the University of Munich’s Department of Geography as a full professor of human-environment relations.
Binder joined EPFL in March 2016 and set up the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at ENAC; she also holds the La Mobilière Chair on Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living.
Her research involves analyzing, modelling and assessing the transition of urban systems towards sustainability. She looks in particular at how we can better understand the dynamics of urban metabolism, what characterizes a sustainable city, and what drives and hinders transformation processes. She does so by combining knowledge from social, natural and data science. Her research focuses on food, energy, and sustainable living and transport in urban systems.
In Switzerland, Binder was appointed to the Research Council, Programs Division of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2016 and serves on the Steering Committee of the SNSF’s National Research Program 71, “Managing Energy Consumption” and the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER). She is also a member of the Steering Board on Sustainability Research for the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the University Council of the University of Munich (LMU).
At EPFL, Binder is the academic director of Design Together, a cross-disciplinary teaching initiative. She was appointed to the management team of the Energy Center in 2018 and as head of the working group on EPFL’s energy and sustainability strategy in 2019.
David Atienza AlonsoDavid Atienza Alonso is an associate professor of EE and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers and edge AI architectures. Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 350 papers, one book, and 12 patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and award, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned two best paper awards at the VLSI-SoC 2009 and CST-HPCS 2012 conference, and five best paper award nominations at the DAC 2013, DATE 2013, WEHA-HPCS 2010, ICCAD 2006, and DAC 2004 conferences. He serves or has served as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019 and was GOLD member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CASS from 2010 to 2012. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM and an IEEE Fellow.
Vassily HatzimanikatisDr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).
Martin VetterliMartin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.
Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.
Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.
Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.
Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.
Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.
He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.
Francesco MondadaDr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.
Jean-Yves Le BoudecJean-Yves Le Boudec is full professor at EPFL and fellow of the IEEE. He graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud, Paris, where he obtained the Agregation in Mathematics in 1980 (rank 4) and received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of Rennes, France. From 1984 to 1987 he was with INSA/IRISA, Rennes. In 1987 he joined Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada, as a member of scientific staff in the Network and Product Traffic Design Department. In 1988, he joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory where he was manager of the Customer Premises Network Department. In 1994 he joined EPFL as associate professor. His interests are in the performance and architecture of communication systems. In 1984, he developed analytical models of multiprocessor, multiple bus computers. In 1990 he invented the concept called "MAC emulation" which later became the ATM forum LAN emulation project, and developed the first ATM control point based on OSPF. He also launched public domain software for the interworking of ATM and TCP/IP under Linux. He proposed in 1998 the first solution to the failure propagation that arises from common infrastructures in the Internet. He contributed to network calculus, a recent set of developments that forms a foundation to many traffic control concepts in the internet. He earned the Infocom 2005 Best Paper award, with Milan Vojnovic, for elucidating the perfect simulation and stationarity of mobility models, the 2008 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize in the Field of Communications Networking, with Bozidar Radunovic, for the analysis of max-min fairness and the 2009 ACM Sigmetrics Best Paper Award, with Augustin Chaintreau and Nikodin Ristanovic, for the mean field analysis of the age of information in gossiping protocols. He is or has been on the program committee or editorial board of many conferences and journals, including Sigcomm, Sigmetrics, Infocom, Performance Evaluation and ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking. He co-authored the book "Network Calculus" (2001) with Patrick Thiran and is the author of the book "Performance Evaluation of Computer and Communication Systems" (2010).
Daniel FavratDaniel Favrat got his Master degree in Mechanical Engineering from EPFL in 1972 and his PhD also from EPFL. He then spent 12 years in industrial research laboratories in Canada (Esso Canada) and Switzerland (CERAC: Centre Européen de Recherche Atlas Copco). From 1988 to 2013, he was full professor and director of the Industrial Energy Systems Laboratory (LENI) at EPFL. During that period he was successively director of the Institute of Energy and director of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. From August 2013 he works at EPFL Energy Center first as director ad interim and now as director technologies.
His research fields include systemic analyses accounting for energy, environment and economics (so-called environomic optimisation) and advanced conversion systems for a more rational use of energy (heat pumps &ORC, engines, fuel cells, power plants, etc).
He is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and of the National Academy of Technology in France. He has also an active participation in the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) as a member of the executive committee and vice-chair of the energy committee. He is associate editor of the journal "Energy" and of International Journal of thermodynamics. He is the author of several books on thermodynamics and energy systems analysis. He is also affiliate professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
Jean-Louis ScartezziniDirector of EPFL Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (1994-present); Founder & Director of ENAC Institute of Infrastructures, Resources and Environment (2002-2009); Founder & Director of EPFL Doctoral Program in Environment (2002-2009); Co-Director of EPFL Institute of Building Technology (1994-1997); Associate Professor of Building Physics at EPFL (1994-1997); Associate Professor of Building Physics at University of Geneva (1990-1997); Group Leader & Research Fellow at the EPFL Solar Energy Research Group (1981-1989); Research Fellow at the Applied Geophysics Institute of University of Lausanne (1980-1981).
Jürgen BruggerI am a Professor of Microengineering and co-affiliated to Materials Science. Before joining EPFL I was at the MESA Research Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, in Tokyo, Japan. I received a Master in Physical-Electronics and a PhD degree from Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Research in my laboratory focuses on various aspects of MEMS and Nanotechnology. My group contributes to the field at the fundamental level as well as in technological development, as demonstrated by the start-ups that spun off from the lab. In our research, key competences are in micro/nanofabrication, additive micro-manufacturing, new materials for MEMS, increasingly for wearable and biomedical applications. Together with my students and colleagues we published over 200 peer-refereed papers and I had the pleasure to supervise over 25 PhD students. Former students and postdocs have been successful in receiving awards and starting their own scientific careers. I am honoured for the appointment in 2016 as Fellow of the IEEE “For contributions to micro and nano manufacturing technology”. In 2017 my lab was awarded an ERC AdvG in the field of advanced micro-manufacturing.
Dominique BonvinDominique Bonvin is Professor and Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory of EPFL. He received his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from ETH Zürich, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked in the field of process control for the Sandoz Corporation in Basel and with the Systems Engineering Group of ETH Zürich. He joined the EPFL in 1989, where his current research interests include modeling, control and optimization of dynamic systems. He served as Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory for the periods 1993-97, 2003-2007 and again since 2012, Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1995-97 and Dean of Bachelor and Master Studies at EPFL for the period 2004-2011.
Jean-Pierre HubauxJean-Pierre Hubaux is a full professor at EPFL and head of the Laboratory for Data Security. Through his research, he contributes to laying the foundations and developing the tools for protecting privacy in today’s hyper-connected world. He has pioneered the areas of privacy and security in mobile/wireless networks and in personalized health. He is the academic director of the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT). He leads the Data Protection in Personalized Health (DPPH) project funded by the ETH Council and is a co-chair of the Data Security Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). From 2008 to 2019 he was one of the seven commissioners of the Swiss FCC. He is a Fellow of both IEEE (2008) and ACM (2010). Recent awards: two of his papers obtained distinctions at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2015 and 2018. He is among the most cited researchers in privacy protection and in information security. Spoken languages: French, English, German, Italian
