Pascale JablonkaPascale Jablonka is a French/Swiss astrophysicist who specializes in the area of galaxy evolution. She earned a doctorate in astrophysics from the University Paris 7- Denis Diderot in France. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Headquarter of the European Southern Observatory (ESO, Germany), before obtaining a position at CNRS (France). She is currently Directrice de Recherche at CNRS and on leave of absence from Paris Observatory in the Laboratoire d'astrophysique of EPFL. Pascale Jablonka conducts both observations and numerical simulations to gain insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies. Her research focuses on three main topics : > Understanding the nature of the first stars in the Universe > Infering the driving parameters of the galaxy star formation histories > Deciphering the impact of the environment on galaxy evolution. Her research exploits ground-based and space telescopes as well as high performance computing facilities.
Andreas MortensenAndreas Mortensen is currently Professor and Director of the Institute of Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory for Mechanical Metallurgy. He joined the faculty of EPFL 1997 after ten years, from 1986 to 1996, as a member of the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he held the successive titles of ALCOA Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. His research is focussed on the processing, microstructural development and mechanical behavior of advanced metallic materials with particular focus on metal matrix composites and metal foams, on infiltration processing and capillarity, and on damage and fracture in metallic materials. He is author or co-author of two monographs, around one hundred and eighty scientific or technical publications and twelve patents. Born in San Francisco in 1957, of dual (Danish and US) nationality, Andreas Mortensen graduated in 1980 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris with a Diplôme dIngénieur Civil, and earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 1986. Besides his academic employment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Nippon Steel during part of 1986, and was invited professor at the Ecole des Mines in Paris during the academic year 1995 to 1996. He is a member of the editorial committee of International Materials Reviews and has co-edited four books. He is a Fellow of ASM, a recipient of the Howe Medal and the Grossman Award of the American Society of Metals, was awarded the Péchiney Prize by the French Academy of Sciences and the Res Metallica Chair from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, received three EPFL teaching awards, is one of ISIs Highly Cited authors for Materials Science since 2002 and was awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2012.
Klaus KernKlaus Kern is Professor of Physics at EPFL and Director and Scientific Member at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. He also is Honorary Professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His present research interests are in nanoscale science, quantum technology and in microscopy at the atomic limits of space and time. He holds a chemistry degree and PhD from the University of Bonn and a honorary doctors degree from the University of Aalborg. After his doctoral studies he was staff scientist at the Research Center Jülich and visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill before joining the Faculty of EPFL in 1991 and the Max-Planck-Society in 1998. Professor Kern has authored and coauthored close to 700 scientific publications, which have received nearly 60‘000 citations. He has served frequently on advisory committees to universities, professional societies and institutions and has received numerous scientific awards and honors, including the 2008 Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize and the 2016 Van‘t Hoff Prize. Prof. Kern has also educated a large number of leading scientists in nanoscale physics and chemistry. During the past twenty-five years he has supervised one hundred PhD students and sixty postdoctoral fellows. Today, more than fifty of his former students and postdocs hold prominent faculty positions at Universities around the world.
Michel RappazAfter a PhD in solid state physics (1978) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a post-doc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Michel Rappaz joined the Institute of Materials of EPFL in 1981. After two years in an engineering company, he came back to EPFL in 1984 where he was nominated Adjunct Professor in 1990 and Full Professor in 2003. He retired from EPFL in 2015 and is now Emeritus Professor and independent consultant for several industries and research centres.
His main interests are in phase transformations and solidification, in particular the coupling of macroscopic aspects of heat and mass transfer with microscopic aspects of microstructure and defect formation. Among his diverse achievements, one can mention in particular the development of cellular automata for grain structure predictions and of granular models for hot tearing formation in castings, the coupling of Finite Element method with microscopic models of nucleation and growth, the application of the phase field method to the understanding of various microstructures, the discovery of quasicrystal mediated-nucleation in alloys, and many other studies both fundamental at the microstructure-defect level and more applied at the level of processes.
Some of the software developments have been commercialized by a spin-off company founded by his group in 1991 (Calcom SA), now part of the French company ESI. Michel Rappaz initiated in 1992 an annual postgraduate course on solidification which has been attended by more than 900 participants from all over the world. He is presently collaborating closely with another spin-off company started from his group, Novamet SàrL.
Michel Rappaz has received several awards, in particular the Mathewson co-author award (1994) and author award (1997) of the American Mineral, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), the Koerber foundation award jointly with Profs Y. Bréchet and M. Asbby (1996), the Sainte-Claire Deville Medal (1996) and the Grand Medal (2011) from the French Materials Society, the Bruce Chalmers Award of TMS (2002), the Mc Donald Memorial Lecture award of Canada (2005), the FEMS European Materials Gold Medal (2013) and the Brimacombe Prize of TMS (2015). He is a highly-cited author of ISI, a fellow of ASM, IOP and TMS, and has co-authored more than 200 publications and two books.
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.
Roland LogéRoland Logé is an associate professor at EPFL, with a primary affiliation to the Materials Institute, and a secondary affiliation to the Microengineering Institute.
After graduating in 1994 at UCL (Belgium) in Materials Engineering, he earned a Master of Science in Mechanics in 1995, at UCSB Santa Barbara (USA). He received his PhD at Mines Paristech-CEMEF (France) in 1999, where he specialized in metal forming and associated microstructure evolutions. After a postdoc at Cornell University (USA) between 1999 and 2001, he entered CNRS in France.
In 2008, he was awarded the ALCAN prize from the French Academy of Sciences, together with Yvan Chastel.
In 2009 he became head of the Metallurgy-Structure-Rheology research group at CEMEF.
In 2011, he launched a “Groupement de Recherche” (GDR), funded by CNRS, networking most of the researchers in France involved in recrystallization and grain growth.
In 2013, he became Research Director at CNRS.
In March 2014 he joined EPFL as the head of the Laboratory of Thermomechanical Metallurgy.
Giorgio MargaritondoCitizen of the USA and Switzerland, Giorgio Margaritondo was born in Rome, Italy, in 1946. He received the Laurea summa cum laude from the University of Rome in 1969. From 1969 he was an employee of the Italian National Research Council in Rome and Frascati and, in 1975-77, he was at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1978 to 1990, he was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA; in 1984 he was nominated associate director for research of the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the same university. In 1990 he was nominated "professeur ordinaire" (full professor) at the EPFL; he directed the Institute of Applied Physics and the Physics Department. He was also a honorary faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2001 he became Dean of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. In 2004 he was nominated Provost and he served until 2010, when he became Dean of Continuing Education, until his retirement from the EPFL in 2016 In addition to teaching general physics, his activity concerns the physics of semiconductors and superconductors (electronic states, surfaces and interfaces) and of biological systems; his main experimental techniques are electron spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, x-ray imaging and scanning near-field microscopy, including experiments with synchrotron light and with free electron lasers. Author of more than 700 scientific publications and 9 books, he was also coordinator in 1995-98 of the scientific division of the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste. In 1997-2003 he was coordinator of the European Commission Round Table on synchrotron radiation, and then became president of the Council of the European Commission Integrated Initiative on Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Science (IA-SFS and then ELISA), the largest network in the world in this domain. In 2011-15, he was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). He is currently vice-president of the council of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), and president of the Scientific and Technological Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Vacuum Society and Fellow and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics.
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.
Christos ComninellisChristos Comninellis, of Greek origin, born in 1945, received his Bachelor of Science in chemistry (distinction with honor) in 1970 from the University of Alexandria.
From 1971 to 1975, he worked as a chemist at the Institute of chemical engineering at the EPFL, where he achieved his PhD in technical sciences in 1979 for his research on the electrochemical fluorination of organic compounds in anhydrous hydrogen fluoride.
Appointed professor in 1996, he teaches at the Faculty of Basic Sciences (FSB) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL)
Applied Chemistry.
Transport Phenomena.
Chemical and Electrochemical Technologies Related to the Environment.
Electrochemical Engineering.
He also holds a teaching position at the Haute Ecole Valaisanne Sion (HEVs).
His research work is focused on environmental electrochemistry, electrocatalysis, fuel cell and electrochemical promotion in catalysis. An applied research for the utilization of electrochemical techniques in industry for the protection of the environment is a constant concern within his activities. As a result, the collaboration with the industry enabled the development of oxidation processes with regeneration of the oxidant using a new type of bipolar electrochemical reactor.
Christos Comninellis has published over 170 scientific papers, directed 17 doctoral theses and holds 14 patents. He has participated in over 130 international symposia, giving five plenary lectures during the last five years. He has been president of the Evaluation Committee of the FSB since the beginning of 2004 and is member of the jury of the EPFL prize for outstanding PhD-thesis.
Christian Ludwig2005 - today: Adjunct Professor at EPFL in the field of Solid Waste Treatment and head of the Chemical Processes and Materials research group (CPM) at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Joint EPFL-PSI Professorship on Solid Waste Treatment. 2000 - today: Head, Group of Chemical Processes and Materials (CPM) at Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). In 2009 the LEM unit was closed and the CPM group is now affiliated to the Bioenergy and Catalysis Laboratory (LBK) of the Energy and Environment Research Division (ENE). Since June 2002 permanent position ("tenure"). 1997 - 1999: Senior Scientist. Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), General Energy Research Department, Element Cycles Section. 1995 - 1997: Research Fellow. Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG), Department of Resource and Waste Management. 1993 - 1995: Post-doc Fellow. University of California Davis, Department of Land, Air, and Water Resources (LAWR). 1990 - 1993: PhD Student. University of Berne, Department of Inorganic, Analytical, and Physical Chemistry. 1989 - 1990: Master Student. University of Berne, Department of Inorganic, Analytical, and Physical Chemistry.
Harald BruneOriginaire de Münich en Allemagne, né en 1961, Harald Brune obtient son diplôme en physique de l'Université Ludwig Maximilians en 1989. Après une thèse en chimie physique à l'Institut Fritz-Haber de la Société Max-Planck à Berlin il obtient son titre de docteur ès sciences en 1992. Dès cela, il rejoint le groupe du Prof. K. Kern à l'Institut de physique expérimentale à l'EPFL. En 1995 il est chercheur invité à Copenhague travaillant en modélisation chez le Prof. J. Nørskov. De retour à l'EPFL, il se voit décerné le prix Latsis EPFL 1996 pour ses études par microscopie à effet tunnel de processus atomiques déterminants la croissance cristalline de couches minces. En 1998 il obtient son habilitation (venia legendi) en Physique et est nommé Maître d'enseignement et de recherche (MER) en nanophysique à l'EPFL. La même année il recoit une offre de Professeur Ordinaire (C4) de l'Université Philipps de Marburg. Début 1999 il réfuse cette offre et accepte un poste de Professeur Extraordinaire à l'EPFL et s'installe au sein de l'Institut de la Physique des Nanostructures. Il est nommé Professeur Ordinaire en 2005. Sa recherche porte sur les propriétés physiques (en particulier le magnétisme et la structure électronique) de nouvelles formes de la matière condensée comme des nanostructures et des couches ultra-minces. Il s'intéresse également à la catalyse hétérogène sur des systèmes inspirés dans leur composition et taille par celle des sites actives dans les enzymes en biologie. Il enseigne la Physique Générale pour ingénieurs, la Physique des matériaux solides pour physiciens, les méthodes expérimentales pour physiciens, ainsi que la Physique des surfaces, interfaces et nanostrcutures à l'école doctorale.
Marco GrioniMarco Grioni was born in Milan (Italy) where he graduated in 1982. He has occupied research positions at Minneapolis (USA), Nijmegen (The Netherlands), Orsay (France) and Neuchâtel, where he became Privat Docent in Solid State Physics in 1994. Since 1996 he is at EPFL, where he teaches physics to undergraduate and graduate students. He is acting director of the Laboratory of Electron Spectroscopy of IPN, and an adjunct professor from 2005.
His research interests concern the electronic properties of novel materials,namely high-temperature superconductors, low-dimensional metals, and heavy fermion compounds, which he investigates by high-resolution photoemission (ARPES), ultrafast time-resolved ARPES, and photon-in photon-out synchrotron-based spectroscopies. Author of approx. 220 scientific articles, he is actively involved in the development of new instruments. From 2003 to 2006 he was the chairman of the users organization of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF Grenoble). Between 2010 and 2017 he served as chairman of the scientific advisory committee of the french national synchrotron light source SOLEIL
Xile HuXile Hu was born in 1978 in Putian, southeastern China. He entered the Peking University in Beijing in 1996. Besides learning too little chemistry, his biggest regret in the college was not able to correct his southern accent in Mandarin. After graduated from PKU, he went to the United States and began his doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego. In December 2004, he finished with a Ph.D. in chemistry and some fond memories of the beautiful city of San Diego. He then moved to the Los Angeles area and become a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. There he enjoyed numerous stimulating scientific (and other) discussions with friends and colleagues. He also made plenty of friends outside the campus and was a frequent in many local Chinese restaurants. In 2007, after two pleasant visits to Switzerland, he decided to move across the continent one more time and join the faculty of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He now directs the Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Catalysis and is interested in developing chemistry for synthesis, energy and sustainability.
Kay SeverinKay Severin was born in Germany in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 with a thesis in the group of Prof. W. Beck, University of Munich. Subsequently, he joined the group of Prof. M. R. Ghadiri as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1997, he started independent research projects ("Habilitation") at the Department of Chemistry, University of Munich. In 2001, he became assistant professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2009, he is full professor at the same institute.
Awards: Bayerischer Habilitations Förderpreis (1997), ADUC award of the year (2001), Heinz Maier-Leibnitz award of the DFG (2001), award of the Karl-Ziegler foundation (2001), Arnold Sommerfeld award of the Bavarian Academy of Science (2001), Werner Prize of The Swiss Chemical Society (2003), Otto Roelen Medal of the DECHEMA (2005), award for chemistry of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen (2007), Dalton Transactions European Lectureship (2008).
Hubert GiraultEducation: 1979 - Engineering diploma from Grenoble Institute of Technology. FRANCE. 1982 - PhD- Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton. Thesis entitled : Interfacial studies using drop image processing techniques. Positions : 1982 - 1984 SERC Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1984 - 1985 CNRS Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1985 - 1992 Lecturer in Physical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh. 1992 - Professor of Physical Chemistry, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. 2011 - 2014 Dean of Bachelor and Master studies Hubert Girault is the author of 2 textbooks, the co-author of about 600 scientific publications with more than 20'000 citations and the co-inventor of more than 15 patents. During his academic career, he has supervised 70 PhD students. 30 alumni of his laboratory are now Professors. Honours: Faraday medal 2006, Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry 2007, Reilley Award 2015. Fellow of the Electrochemical Society (USA), Shikata International medal, Polarography Society of Japan. Associate editor of Chemical Science
