Fernando Porté AgelFERNANDO PORTÉ AGEL Professor Director, Wind Engineering and Renewable Energy Laboratory (WIRE) School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) e-mail: fernando.porte-agel@epfl.ch RESEARCH INTERESTS Environmental fluid mechanics. Computational fluid dynamics. Atmospheric boundary layers. Turbulence. Large-eddy simulation. Wind energy. Wind engineering. Renewable energy. EDUCATION Ph.D. 1999 Johns Hopkins University, Environmental Engineering M.Sc. 1995 Hydrologic Engineering, IHE - Delft, The Netherlands B.S. 1992 Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Spain ACADEMIC POSITIONS 2010-present: Full Professor, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland 2005-2009: Associate Professor, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory and Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA 2000-2005: Assistant Professor, St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS McKnight Presidential Fellow (2006-2009), University of Minnesota, USA McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2003-2005), University of Minnesota, USA NASA Young Investigator Award (2001-2004), USA NSF CAREER Award (2001-2006), (Division of Earth Sciences Hydrological Sciences), USA Outstanding Student Paper Award: Hydrology Section, Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union; San Francisco, 1998. Research Award (1995-1997): La Caixa fellowship program; Barcelona, Spain. Research Award (1993-1995): Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs fellowship. Research Award (1990-1993): Spanish Civil Engineering Association. François AvellanProf. François Avellan, director of the EPFL Laboratory for Hydraulic Machines, graduated in Hydraulic Engineering from Ecole nationale supérieure d'hydraulique, Institut national polytechnique de Grenoble, France, in 1977 and, in 1980, got his doctoral degree in engineering from University of Aix-Marseille II, France. Research associate at EPFL in 1980, he is director of the EPFL Laboratory for Hydraulic Machines since 1994 and, in 2003, was appointed Ordinary Professor in Hydraulic Machinery. Supervising 37 EPFL doctoral theses, he was distinguished by SHF, Société hydrotechnique de France, awarding him the "Grand Prix 2010 de l'hydrotechnique". His main research domains of interests are hydrodynamics of turbine, pump and pump-turbines including cavitation, hydro-acoustics, design, performance and operation assessments of hydraulic machines. Prof. Avellan was Chairman of the IAHR Section on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems from 2002 to 2012. He has conducted successfully several Swiss and international collaborative research projects, involving key hydropower operators and suppliers, such as:
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Coordination for the FP7 European project n° 608532 "HYPERBOLE: HYdropower plants PERformance and flexiBle Operation towards Lean integration of new renewable Energies" (2013-2017);
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Deputy Head of the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research – Supply of Electricity (SCCER-SoE) to carry out innovative and sustainable research in the areas of geo-energy and hydropower for phase I (2013-2016) and Phase II (2017, 2010) to be approved.
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EUREKA European research projects: N° 4150 and N° 3246, "HYDRODYNA, Harnessing the dynamic behavior of pump-turbines", (2003-2011), N° 1605, "FLINDT, Flow Investigation in Draft Tubes", http://flindt.epfl.ch/, (1997-2002). N° 2418, "SCAPIN, Stability of Operation of Francis turbines, prediction and modeling";
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Swiss KTI/CTI research projects with GE Renewable Energy (anc. ALSTOM Hydro), Birr, ANDRITZ Hydro, Kriens, FMV, Sion, Groupe E, Granges-Paccot, Power Vision engineering, Ecublens and SULZER Pumps, Winterthur.
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ETH Domain, HYDRONET Project for the Competence Center Energy and Mobility, PSI Villingen.
Furthermore, he is involved in scientific expertise and independent contractual experimental validations of turbines and pump turbines performances for the main hydropower plants in the world. In recognition for his work as Convenor of the TC4 working group of experts in editing the IEC 60193 standard he received the "IEC 1906 Award" from the International Electrotechnical Commission. Mohamed FarhatM. Farhat was born in Casablanca in 1962 (Moroccan citizen). He graduated at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Hydraulique et de Mécanique de Grenoble (France. He joined The LMH laboratory in 1986 as research assistant. He completed in 1994 a Ph.D. thesis on Cavitation. He joined the R&D department of Hydro-Quebec in Montréal (Canada) in 1995 where he was in charge of several research projects in the areas of production and transportation of hydropower and mainly the monitoring of large hydro turbines. Since 2001, he is senior scientist at the LMH laboratory, head of the cavitation group. He is also lecturer in Master and Doctoral programs. He is member of the Doctoral Committee in Mechanics.
Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
François GallaireNé le 26 février 1975, François Gallaire obtient, en 1998, le diplôme dingénieur de lEcole Polytechnique à Paris et, en 1999, un master en « Physique des liquides » à lUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie, toujours à Paris. Il rejoint ensuite le Laboratoire dhydrodynamique (LadHyX) à lEcole polytechnique où il soutient, en 2003, une thèse sur le thème des instabilités des jets tournants et sur le contrôle de léclatement tourbillonnaire sous la direction de Jean-Marrc Chomaz. En 2003, il est nommé chargé de recherche au CNRS au Laboratoire J.A. Dieudonné de lUniversité de Nice Sophia-Antipolis.En 2009, il rejoint l'EPFL pour y fonder le laboratoire des mécanique des fluides et instabilités (LFMI). Ses recherches se concentrent sur létude des propriétés fondamentales de stabilité des écoulements de fluides et sont guidées par les applications réelles, en particulier le contrôle des écoulements. Récemment, il a réalisé dimportantes contributions dans les domaines de la micro-fluidique (lanalyse de la manipulation par laser dune goutte dans un micro-canal) et la dynamique des bio-fluides (le descriptif mécanique de lanévrisme de laorte abdominale).
Jürg Alexander SchiffmannAfter obtaining his diploma in mechanical engineering from EPFL in 1999 he co-founded a start-up company dedicated to the design of gas bearing supported rotors. In 2005 he joined Fischer Engineering Solutions where he led the development of small-scale, gas bearing supported high-speed turbomachinery for fuel cell air supplies and for domestic scale heat pumps. In parallel he worked on his PhD, which he obtained from EPFL in 2008 and for which he was awarded the SwissElectric Research Award. He then joined the Gas Turbine Lab at MIT as a postdoctoral associate where he worked on foil bearings and on the experimental investigation of radial diffusers. In 2013 he was nominated assistant professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he founds the Laboratory for Applied Mechanical Design. His current research interest are in gas lubricated bearings, in aerodynamics of small-scale compressors and turbines and in automated design and optimization methodologies.
Ali H. SayedAli H. Sayed is Dean of Engineering at EPFL, Switzerland, where he also leads the Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He has also served as Distinguished Professor and Chairman of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He is also a member of the World Academy of Sciences and served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society during 2018 and 2019.
Dr. Sayed is an author/co-author of over 570 scholarly publications and six books. His research involves several areas
including adaptation and learning theories, data and network sciences, statistical inference, and multiagent systems.
His work has been recognized with several major awards including the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award, the 2020 Norbert Wiener Society Award and the 2015 Education Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2014 Papoulis Award from the European Association for Signal Processing, the 2013 Meritorious Service Award and the 2012 Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2005 Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, the 2005 Distinguished Lecturer from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the 2003 Kuwait Prize, and the 1996 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize. His publications have been awarded several Best Paper Awards from the IEEE (2002, 2005, 2012, 2014) and EURASIP (2015). He is a Fellow of IEEE, EURASIP, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the publisher of the journal Science.
