Jean-François MolinariProfessor J.F. Molinari is the director of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (http://lsms.epfl.ch) at EPFL, Switzerland. He holds an appointment in the Civil Engineering institute, which he directed from 2013 to 2017, and a joint appointment in the Materials Science institute. He started his tenure at EPFL in 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2012. He is currently an elected member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation in Division 2 (Mathematics, Natural and Engineering Sciences), and co editor in chief of the journal Mechanics of Materials. J.F. Molinari graduated from Caltech, USA, in 2001, with a M.S. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics. He held professorships in several countries besides Switzerland, including the United States with a position in Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (2000-2006), and France at Ecole Normale Supérieure Cachan in Mechanics (2005-2007), as well as a Teaching Associate position at the Ecole Polytechnique de Paris (2006-2009). The work conducted by Prof. Molinari and his collaborators takes place at the frontier between traditional disciplines and covers several length scales from atomistic to macroscopic scales. Over the years, Professor Molinari and his group have been developing novel multiscale approaches for a seamless coupling across scales. The activities of the laboratory span the domains of damage mechanics of materials and structures, nano- and microstructural mechanical properties, and tribology. 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.
Dimitrios LignosProf. Lignos joined the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2016 from McGill University in Canada where he was a tenured Associate Professor and a William Dawson Scholar for Infrastructure Resilience. He holds a diploma (National Technical University of Athens, NTUA, 2003), M.S. (Stanford University, 2004) and Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2008). In addition, he was a post-doctoral scientist at Stanford University (2009) and in Kyoto University (2010). Prof. Lignos teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in seismic design, nonlinear behaviour of steel and composite structures as well as supplemental damping systems, Structural Stability, Nonlinear Analysis and Performance-based Earthquake Engineering. His awards for teaching, research and service in Civil Engineering include the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award (Faculty of Engineering, McGill University), as well as the Outstanding reviewer (2012, 2013) award from ASCE, the 2013 State-of-the-Art in Civil Engineering Award by ASCE and the 2014 Christophe Pierre Award for Research Excellence - Early Career. Just recently, he received the 2019 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE for significant contributions in developing state of the art methods to simulate extreme limit states in steel structures.Prof. Lignos is a member of ASCE and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He acts as an Associate Editor for Metal Structures and Seismic Effects of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He joined the Editorial Board of Earthquake Spectra and Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics International journals. He serves as an acting member of the CEN/TC 250/SC 8/WG 2 and has been selected as a member of the Project Team (PT2) for the Eurocode 8-Part 1 Current Revisions for Steel and Composite Structures. He is also a member of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) S16 technical committee for Steel Structures. Prof. Lignos is involved as a NEHRP consultant in numerous research-to-practice projects related to the behaviour and nonlinear modelling and analysis of structures applicable to the engineering practice through the Applied Technology Council (ATC). Detailed Curriculum Vitae (last update September 2018)
Francesco VarratoExpertise
Simulation and theory of coarse grained models of soft matter. Studies on colloidal gels, polymer melts, supercooled liquids and glassy systems. Research on physical fractals and dynamically arrested amorphous structures.
Expertise
Simulation and theory of coarse grained models of soft matter. Studies on colloidal gels, polymer melts, supercooled liquids and glassy systems. Research on physical fractals and dynamically arrested amorphous structures.
Teaching & PhD Courses Hands-on with Research
Chiara GabellaTeaching & PhD Courses Hands-on with Research Data Management in Chemistry ChE-601 PhD students in Chemistry will learn hands-on Research Data Management (RDM) skills transferable to their research practices. They willcontextualize their research into RDM best practices (day 1), discover appropriate tools (day 2) and work on a project (day 3) for the courseaccreditation
Viktor KuncakViktor Kunčak joined EPFL in 2007, after receiving a PhD degree from MIT. Since then has been leading the Laboratory for Automated Reasoning and Analysis and supervised at least 12 completed PhD theses. His works on languages, algorithms and systems for verification and automated reasoning. He served as an initiator and one of the coordinators of a European network (COST action) in the area of automated reasoning, verification, and synthesis. In 2012 he received a 5-year single-investigator European Research Council (ERC) grant of 1.5M EUR. His invited talks include those at Lambda Days, Scala Days, NFM, LOPSTR, SYNT, ICALP, CSL, RV, VMCAI, and SMT. A paper on test generation he co-authored received an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at ICSE. A PLDI paper he co-authored was published in the Communications of the ACM as a Research Highlight article. His Google Scholar profile reports an over-approximate H-index of 38. He was an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and served as a co-chair of conferences on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD), Workshop on Synthesis (SYNT), and Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI). At EPFL he teaches courses on functional and parallel programming, compilers, and verification. He has co-taught the MOOC "Parallel Programming" that was visited by over 100'000 learners and completed by thousands of students from all over the world.
Corsin BattagliaCorsin Battaglia directs the laboratory Materials for Energy Conversion at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and is Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Materials Science at EPFL, School of Engineering, Institute of Materials. His research focuses on developing new materials and scalable manufacturing processes for next-generation sustainable energy storage,
