Matteo Dal PeraroMatteo Dal Peraro graduated in Physics at the University of Padua in 2000. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA, Trieste) in 2004. He then received postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) under the guidance of Prof. M. L. Klein. He was nominated Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the EPFL School of Life Sciences in late 2007.
His research at the Laboratory for Biomolecular Modeling (LBM), within the Interfaculty Institute of Bioengineering (IBI), focuses on the multiscale modeling of large macromolecular systems.
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. Berend SmitBerend Smit received an MSc in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and an MSc in Physics both from the Technical University in Delft (the Netherlands). He received in 1990 cum laude PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He was a (senior) Research Physicists at Shell Research from 1988-1997, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 1997-2007.
In 2004 Berend Smit was elected Director of the European Center of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) Lyon France. Since 2007 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley and Faculty Chemist at Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2014 he has been director of the Energy Center at EPFL.
Francesco StellacciFrancesco Stellacci graduated in Materials Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano in 1998 with a thesis on photochromic polymers with Prof. Giuseppe Zerbi and Mariacarla Gallazzi. In 1999 he moved to the Chemistry Department of the University of Arizona for as a post-doc in the group of Joe Perry in close collaboration with the group of Seth Marder. In 2002 he moved to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. He was then promoted to associate without (2006) and with tenure (2009). In 2010 he moved to the Institute of Materials at EPFL as a full Professor. He holds the Alcan EP Chair. Francesco was one of the recipients of the Technology Review TR35 "35 Innovator under 35" award in 2005, and the Popular Science Magazine "Brilliant 10" award in 2007. He has been a Packard Fellow starting 2005.
Paolo De Los RiosPaolo De Los Rios earned his master in Electronic Engineering at the Turin Institute of Technology (Politecnico di Torino) in May 1993. In November 1993 he moved to Trieste, Italy, to enter the PhD program in Theoretical Condensed Matter Theory at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) where he obtained the PhD degree in October 1996 for his work on the statistical physics of disordered systems. After a one year postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, in November 1997 he moved to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, to join the group of Prof. Yi-Cheng Zhang. There he has worked on various applications of statistical physics to complex systems. In September 2000 he has been appointed Assistant Professor in Statistical Physics of Living Matter and Complex Systems at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since April 2010 he is Associate Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
Thomas RizzoEDUCATION
Ph.D., Chemistry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1983
B.S., Chemistry, cum laude, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1978
ACADEMIC AND ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS
Dean, Faculty of Basic Sciences, EPFL, 2004-present
Head, Department of Chemistry, EPFL, 1997-2004
Professor of Chemistry, EPFL, 1994-present
Professor of Chemistry, University of Rochester, 1993-1994
Assistant Professor of Chemistry, University of Rochester, 1986-1992
Research Associate, The James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, 1984-1986
Michael GraetzelProfessor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in building integrated photovoltaics. They engendered perovskite solar cells (PSCs) which turned into the most exciting break-through in the history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. His over 1500 publications have received some 220’000 citations with an h-factor of 218 (SI-Web of Science) demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.
