Jack Richard WilliamsTeaching & PhD Courses Negotiation techniques MGT-466 This course is designed to give you a practical, hands-on opportunity to learn the basics of negotiating, self leadership and the impact of culture. Strategies and techniques are presented and practiced that will enable you to develop your skills and become a confident negotiator.
Vincenzo PalatellaTeaching & PhD Courses Information literacy for chemists ENG-619 Concepts and tools to understand and use the modem chemical information environment Learn how to explore the scientific literature, how to use the information found in agreement with intellectual property laws, and learn about the current trends impacting chemists as creators of knowledge. Research skills in the Open Science Era CIVIL-608 Research Skills in the Open Science Era is a course designed to explore t
Sylvain CalinonExpertise
robot learning, human-robot collaboration, optimal control, model-based optimization
I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at EPFL, with research interests covering robot learning, optimal control, geometrical approaches, and human-robot collaboration. My work focuses on human-centered robotics applications in which the robots can acquire new skills from only few demonstrations and interactions. It requires the development of models that can exploit the st
Edoardo ChiarottiTeaching & PhD Courses Data Science & Causal Inference for Sustainability MGT-499 This class explores key climate questions through data. Students will learn to collect, clean, and analyze data, apply causal methods using Python, and communicate insights clearly. With a focus on sustainability, the course builds skills to avoid pitfalls and draw meaningful conclusions.
Gioele La MannoTeaching & PhD PhD Students Albert Dominguez Mantes, Xinyi Huang, Laura Lapeña Gil, Alessandro Valente, Luca Fusar Bassini, Hao-An Hsiung, Alireza Gargoorimotlagh, Morgane Alice Storey, Rosan Martine Hans, María Cristina Loureiro Casalderrey, Lada Polyakova Past EPFL PhD Students Alex Russell Lederer, Irina Khven Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Alexandre Coudray, Alex Russell Lederer, Halima Hannah Emilie Schede, Irina Khven Courses Biological data science I: statistical learning BIOENG-210
Quentin GalleaTeaching & PhD Courses Data Science & Causal Inference for Sustainability MGT-499 This class explores key climate questions through data. Students will learn to collect, clean, and analyze data, apply causal methods using Python, and communicate insights clearly. With a focus on sustainability, the course builds skills to avoid pitfalls and draw meaningful conclusions. Economics for challenging times MGT-494 This course analyzes socio-economic issues related to poverty, inequ
Guillaume AnciauxResearchResearch Topics My research can be decomposed in three main blocks:First, the main goal of my current research is the physical description of contact interactions. I performed numerous studies of this topic using different models from the continuum scale down to atomistic scale. Since atomic phenomena and macroscopic observations are linked, the physics of contact needs the simultaneous consideration of several scales. For instance, plasticity is a theory defined for the macroscopic scale whereas t
Andrea CapozziExpertise
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)Electron Spin Resonance (ESR)Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP)Hyperpolarization TechniquesCryogenics
Open PhD positions
Open PhD position on the Physics of Xenon hyperpolarizationA PhD student position is available on the Physics of Xenon hyperpolarization: Spin Exchange Optical Pumping (SEOP) and Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP)The project builds on a well-established and long-standing collaboration between the Laboratory for Functional and Metabolic Imaging at
Yves PedrazziniYves Pedrazzini is MER / Senior Scientist in the Laboratory of Urban Sociology (LaSUR), Faculty of Natural, Architectural and Build Environment (ENAC) of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL). For more than 20 years, he analyses urban dynamics, social practices, urban cultures, violence and insecurity phenomena, in North and South countries. In 1987, he began ethnographical studies of youth armed gangs in Latin-American slums, developing innovative qualitative methods to make them real protagonists of the research process. Since 1997, Yves Pedrazzini added to his urban experience in Latin America (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela) new expertise of African urban contexts (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal). He published many books and articles on urban violence and Security/insecurity issues, from a sociological and anthropological point of view.
Roland John TormeyI am a sociologist and learning scientist researching and teaching on engineering education. I'm particularly focused on the roles of emotion and self-regulation in engineering teaching and learning. My profile is accessible here.
Ambrogio FasoliAmbrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.
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.
Ingrid Le DucI am committed and passionate for furthering Academic Development as a profession that intersects with current educational standards and teachers real concerns. Being exposed to a variety of academic cultures I grew a particular interest in understanding learning and its behavior taking into consideration how learning may be influenced by external and societal factors. Studies: PhD in Social Psychology, London School of Economics, 2001. Thesis title: 'Social Representations of Human Rights: the case of the patrona-muchacha relationship'. A look inside the private life of women in Mexican middle-class urban households. Licenciatura in Psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, UNAM, 1995. Additional training: I am currently training as a systemic and strategic therapist at the Gregory Bateson Institute, the European representation of the Mental Research Institute located in Palo Alto, California. In 2004 I became an accredited Quality Management Evaluator of the European Foundation of Quality Management EFQM. Experience: Before joining EPFL in 2009, I worked at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) where I collaborated as a Quality Advisor for teachers and instructors. Teaching assistant at the Department of Social Psychology of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My first job in Educational Development was as part of a newly established Pedagogical Research Support for the Virtual Campus Project of the renowned Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM)at Mexico City (1996-1997). I volunteered for many causes, such as for the Indo-American Refugee and Migrant Organization (IRMO), in London and Amnesty International. Mandates: During my free-time I participate on trainings on scientific communication and teaching in Higher Education.
Delphine PreissmannTeaching & PhD Courses Brain, mind and society HUM-256 This course aims to address topics related to research on brain causes of human actions. The course will introduce to fundamental concepts in psychology, cognitive and social neurosciences and the links between brain and mental illness. Health A: Innovation, Equity, Sustainability HUM-125(a) The course provides an interdisciplinary examination of key global health challenges, focusing on biomedical innovations, pharmaceut
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.
Pascal FuaPascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
Aude BillardExpertise
RoboticsMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceHuman-Robot InteractionMechatronicsDynamical Systems ControlComputational Neuroscience
Aude Billard is full professor and head of the LASA laboratory at the School of Engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and the Director of the Swiss Innovation Booster on Robotics. Dr. Billard acts as the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), after serving in several roles in the administrative and executive committe
