Pierre-André FarinePierre-André Farine received the Doctoral and Engineering Degrees in Microtechnology from University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, respectively in 1984 and 1978, and the Engineering in Microtechnology from ETS Le Locle in 1974.
He was working 17 years for the Swiss watch industries (Swatch Group), including developments for high-tech products, such as pager watches, watches including integrated sensors such as pressure, compass, altimeter and temperature sensors for Tissot. He was also involved in prototypes developments for watches including GPS and cellular GSM phones.
Since 8 years, he is Professor in Electronics and Signal Processing at the Institute of Microtechnology IMT, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Full professor at EPFL since January 1st, 2009, he works in the field of low-power integrated products for portable devices, including microelectronics for wireless telecommunications, UWB and GNSS systems. He is Head of the Electronics and Signal Processing Laboratory ESPLAB of the EPFL IMT-NE. His laboratory works also for video and audio compression algorithms and their implementation in low power integrated circuits.
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.
Karen ScrivenerDe nationalité anglaise, Karen Scrivener est née en 1958. Au cours de sa carrière, ses travaux et sa recherche traitaient des domaines suivants: Identification du développement microstucturale pendant l'hydratation du ciment. Elaboration d'une approche multitechnique pour étudier la microstucture des ciments et bétons, avec accent sur la quantification par analyse des images d'électrons retrodiffusés. Caractérisation de l'auréole de transition de la pâte de ciment autour des granulats. Compréhension des processus de dégardation des bétons, en particulier le gonflement lié à la formation de l'éttringite retardée dans les bétons étuvés.
Anna Fontcuberta i Morral2014 Associate Professor at the Institut des Matériaux, EPFL
2008 Assistant Professor Tenure Track at the Institut des Matériaux, EPFL
2009 Habilitation in Physics, Technische Universität München
2005-2010 Marie Curie Excellence Grant Team Leader at Walter Schottky Institut, Technische Universität München, on leave from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France)
2004-2005 Visiting Scientist at the California Institute of Technology, on leave from CNRS; Senior Scientist and co-founder of Aonex Technologies (a startup company for large area layer transfer of InP and Ge on foreign substrates for the main application of multi-junction solar cells)
2003 Permanent Research Fellow at CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, France
2001-2002 Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology
Study of wafer bonding and hydrogen-induced exfoliation processes for integration of mismatched materials in views of photovoltaic applications
Sponsor: Professor Harry A. Atwater
1998-2001 PhD in Materials Science, Ecole Polytechnique
Study of polymorphous silicon: growth mechanisms, optical and structural properties. Application to Solar Cells and Thin Film Transistors
Advisor: Pere Roca i Cabarrocas
1997-1998 Diplôme dEtudes Approfondis (D.E.A.) in Materials Science at Université Paris XI, France .
1993-1997 BA in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona
Guido HaefeliTeaching & PhD PhD Students Federico Ronchetti, Gauri Napoletano Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Axel Kuonen, Olivier Göran Girard, Carina Trippl Courses Particle detection PHYS-440 The course will cover the physics of particle detectors. It will introduce the experimental techniques used in nuclear and particle physics. The lecture includes the interaction of particles with matter, scintillators, gas detectors, silicon detectors, detectors for particle ID and photo-detectors.
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.
Hans Peter HerzigDr. Hans Peter Herzig is Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Past President of the European Optical Society (EOS). His current research interests include refractive and diffractive micro-optics, nano-scale optics and optical MEMS.
Hans Peter Herzig received his diploma in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1978. From 1978 to 1982 he was a scientist with the Optics Development Department of Kern in Aarau, Switzerland, working in lens design and optical testing. In 1983, he became a graduate research assistant with the Applied Optics Group at the Institute of Microtechnology of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, working in the field of holographic optical elements. In 1987, he received his PhD degree in optics. From 1989 to 2001 he was head of the micro-optics research group in Neuchâtel. From 2002 to 2008 he was a full professor and head of the Applied Optics Laboratory at the University of Neuchâtel. Professor Herzig joined the faculty at EPFL in January 2009.
He is member of OSA, IEEE Photonics Society and Fellow of EOS. 2009-2010 he was President of the European Optical Society (EOS), 2001-2009 Vice-President of the Swiss Society of Optics and Microscopy and 2012-2014 Vice-President of ICO. Dr. Herzig is in the editorial board of different scientific journals (JM3, Optical Review, JEOS). He served as Conference Chairman for international conferences of EOS, IEE, IEEE/LEOS, OSA and SPIE; and as Guest Editor of three special issues of IEEE, OSA journals. He is editor of a well-known book on micro-optics (published in English and Chinese), author of 14 book chapters, over 150 peer reviewed articles and 300 conference proceedings.
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. Alexandre ButtlerI am a honorary professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne - EPFL. Up to 2019, I was a joint-professor between EPFL (Head of the laboratory of Ecological Systems - ECOS) and the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL for Forest, Snow and Landscape (Head of the research group Pasture Woodlands and Wetlands) and head of the Site WSL-Lausanne. I was also professor at the laboratory of Chrono-Environnement (UMR CNRS 6249) of the University of Franche-Comté, Besançon (France). I am author or co-author of over 160 papers in international ISI cited peer-reviewed journals.
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.
Frédéric MilaExpertise
Condensed matter theory, strongly correlated systems, frustrated and quantum magnetism, tensor networks
Mission
Perform research in condensed matter theory, whenever possible in collaboration with experimentalists at EPFL and throughout the world
Current Work
- Magnetism on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice- Tensor network approach to 2D strongly correlated systems- Thermal properties of 2D frustrated quantum magnets- Exotic phases of quantum one-dimensional models
Since 2003 Full Professor at EPFL (
Rolf GruetterAwards:
1999 Young Investigator Award Plenary Lectureship
, International Society for Neurochemistry
2011 Fellow
, ESMRMB
2011 Teaching Award
, Section Sciences de la Vie, EPFL
