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.
Damir FilipovicDamir Filipovic holds the Swissquote Chair in Quantitative Finance and is Swiss Finance Institute Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Prior to this, he was head of the Vienna Institute of Finance and professor at the University of Vienna. He previously held the chair of financial and insurance mathematics at the University of Munich, and he was on the faculty of Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from ETH Zurich in 2000. Damir Filipovic worked as a scientific consultant for the Swiss Federal Office of Private Insurance from 2003 to 2004. There he co-developed the Swiss Solvency Test, which defines the regulatory capital requirement for all Swiss based insurance companies and groups. He is on the editorial board of several academic journals. His research interests include the term structure of interest rates, credit and volatility risk, quantitative methods in risk management, and stochastic processes. His papers have been published in a variety of academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Mathematical Finance, Finance and Stochastics, and the Annals of Applied Probability. He is the author of a textbook titled Term-Structure Models.
Martin RajmanMartin Rajman is the Executive Director of
Nano-tera.ch
, a large Swiss Research Program funding collaborative multi-disciplinary projects for the engineering of complex systems in Health and the Environment. Since 2008, the Nano-Tera.ch program started more than 100 research projects for a total public funding of more than 95 Mo CHF (~100 Mo USD).
Before being appointed as Nano-Tera.ch Executive Director, Martin Rajman was Director of the EPFL Global Computing Center (CGC), an association of research groups and laboratories of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences fostering interdisciplinary research in the general area of internet computing and distributed information systems. In this position, he was managing more than 20 European projects.
In parallel with his research management activities, Martin Rajman is senior researcher at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL). His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics and Data-driven Probabilistic Machine Learning.
Previously, he was senior researcher at the Computer Science Department of Telecom Paris-Tech, where he was in charge of the development of a research and teaching activity in the domain of Natural Language Processing.
Martin Rajman is also active in various large scale industry-research collaborations with majors economic players. In particular, he has been involved in the improvement of the product ranking technology used by e-Bay and is currently collaborating with Elsevier on enhanced article recommendation techniques.
Martin Rajman is author or co-author of more than 100 publications and former Director of the Computer Science Series of EPFL-Press (PPUR).
Andreas FusterAndreas Fuster is an Associate Professor of Finance at Swiss Finance Institute @ EPFL and a Research Fellow at the CEPR. Previously, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Swiss National Bank. Andreas's main research interests are in empirical finance, macroeconomics, and behavioral economics. His recent work has focused in particular on the effects of technological advances on household credit markets. Andreas’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies. Andreas obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University and also holds an M.Phil. from Oxford University and a B.A. from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), all in economics.
Paul Joseph DysonPaul Dyson joined the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the EPFL in 2002 where he heads the Laboratory of Organometallic and Medicinal Chemistry and between 2008 and 2016 chaired the Institute. He has won several prizes including the Werner Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society in 2004, the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Bioorganometallic Chemistry in 2010, the Centennial Luigi Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society in 2011, the Bioinorganic Chemistry Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2015, the European Sustainable Chemistry Award of the European Chemical Society in 2018 and the Green Chemistry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2020. He is also a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and has an H-index >110 (web of science and google scholar). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2010, a Fellow of the European Academy of Science in 2019 and a life-long fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020. Over the years he has held visiting professorships at the University of Bourgogne, University of Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Vienna, University of Rome Tor Vergara, Chimie Paristech and Shangai Jiao Tong University.Since 2016 he has been Member of the Council of the Division of Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swiss National Science Foundation.Between 2016-2021 he has been Member of the Council of the Division of Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences at the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2021 he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Basic Sciences.
Denis GilletDenis Gillet received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Information Systems also from the EPFL in 1995. During 1992 he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University in the United States. He is currently Maître d'enseignement et de recherche at the EPFL School of Engineering, where he leads the React research group. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. Denis Gillet is affiliated at EPFL with the Center for Intelligent Systems and the Center for Digital Education.
Max-Olivier HonglerExpertise
Processus stochastiquesContrôle optimal
Enseignement et PhD A dirigé les thèses EPFL de Yves Salama, Philippe Ciprut, Fabrice Dusonchet, Roger Filliger, Olivier Gallay, Julio Rodriguez, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti
Michaela HirschmannTeaching & PhD PhD Students Patrick Hirling, Jonathan Petersson, Lucie Scharré Courses Astrophysics III : galaxy formation and evolution PHYS-465 Galaxy formation & evolution is about studying how galaxies in our Universe come into existence, how they evolve and what shapes their properties. This course describes the observational facts of galaxies and the various processes of galaxy evolution as seen from theoretical/numerical models. General physics : thermodynamics (English) P
François MaréchalPh D. in engineering Chemical process engineer
Researcher and lecturer in the field of computer aided process and energy systems engineering.
Lecturer in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and environmental sciences engineering in EPFL.
I'm responsible for the Minor in Energy of EPFL and I'm involved in 3 projects of the Competence Center in Energy and Mobility (2nd generation biofuel, Wood SOFC, and gas turbine development with CO2 mitigation) in which i'm contributing to the energy conversion system design and optimisation.
Short summary of my scientific carrer
After a graduation in chemical engineering from the University of Liège, I have obtained a Ph. D. from the University of Liège in the LASSC laboratory of Prof. Kalitventzeff (former president of the European working party on computer aided process engineering). This laboratory was one of the pioneering laboratory in the field of Computer Aided Process Engineering.
In the group of Professor Kalitventzeff, I have worked on the development and the applications of data reconciliation, process modelling and optimisation techniques in the chemical process industry, my experience ranges from nuclear power stations to chemical plants. In the LASSC, I have been responsible from the developments in the field of rational use of energy in the industry. My first research topic has been the methodological development of process integration techniques, combining the use of pinch based methods and of mathematical programming: e.g. for the design of multiperiod heat exchanger networks or Mixed integer non linear programming techniques for the optimal management of utility systems. Fronted with applications in the industry, my work then mainly concentrated on the optimal integration of utility systems considering not only the energy requirements but the cost of the energy requirements and the energy conversion systems. I developed methods for analysing and integrating the utility system, the steam networks, combustion (including waste fuel), gas turbines or other advanced energy conversion systems (cogeneration, refrigeration and heat). The techniques applied uses operation research tools like mixed integer linear programming and exergy analysis. In order to evaluate the results of the utility integration, a new graphical method for representing the integration of the utility systems has been developed. By the use of MILP techniques, the method developed for the utility integration has been extended to handled site scale problems, to incorporate environmental constraints and reduce the water usage. This method (the Effect Modelling and Optimisation method) has been successfully applied to the chemical plants industry, the pulp and paper industry and the power plant. Instead of focusing on academic problems, I mainly developed my research based on industrial applications that lead to valuable and applicable patented results. Recently the methods developed have been extended to realise the thermoeconomic optimisation of integrated systems like fuel cells. My present R&D work concerns the application of multi-objective optimisation strategies in the design of processes and integrated energy conversion systems.
Since 2001, Im working in the Industrial Energy Systems Laboratory (LENI) of Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where Im leading the R&D activities in the field of Computer Aided Analysis and Design of Industrial Energy Systems with a major focus on sustainable energy conversion system development using thermo-economic optimisation methodologies. A part from the application and the development of process integration techniques, that remains my major field of expertise, the applications concern :
Rational use of water and energy in Industrial processes and industrial production sites : projects with NESTLE, EDF, VEOLIA and Borregaard (pulp and paper).Energy conversion and process design : biofuels from waste biomass (with GASNAT, EGO and PSI), water dessalination and waste water treatment plant (VEOLIA), power plant design (ALSTOM), Energy conversion from geothermal sources (BFE). Integrated energy systems in urban areas : together with SCANE and SIG (GE) and IEA annexe 42 for micro-cogeneration systems.
I as well contributed to the definition of the 2000 Watt society and to studies concerning the emergence of green technologies on the market in the frame of the Alliance for Global Sustainability.
