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.
Marianne LiebiMarianne Liebi is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPF Lausanne and head of the Laboratory for X-ray characterization of materials (cam-X) and the group “
Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials
” at PSI. She has been appointed in 2021 at EPFL where she is part of the Institute of Materials within the School of Engineering. Marianne Liebi studied Food Science at ETH Zurich where she also obtained her PhD in 2013 in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering lead by Prof. Erich J. Windhab. Within this project started using small-angle neutron scattering at PSI for the characterization of soft-matter, namely of magnetic alignable self-assembly structures. As a Postdoc in the coherent X-ray scattering group at the Swiss Light Source she worked from 2013-2016 on method development in SAXS tensor tomography. In 2016 she moved to Sweden where after a short period at the NanoMAX beamline, MAXIV Laboratory, Lund she started her own research group in 2017 as Assistant Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, and became Docent in Physics in spring 2020. She kept her affiliation at Chalmers University of Technology, where still part of her group is located (
Liebi research group
) when moving back to Switzerland in 2020 where she was Scientific Group Leader in the Center for X-ray Analytics at Empa, St.Gallen, before starting the joint position between EPFL and PSI in November 2021.
Jean-Jacques MeisterA Swiss citizen, Jean-Jacques Meister was born in 1950. He received a diploma in electrical engineering, then a diploma in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He joined the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and obtained a PhD in1983. From 1984 to 1990, he worked in different areas of biophysics and biomedical engineering. His main contributions concern novel noninvasive methods for the prevention and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases: mechanical properties of the arterial wall, arterial hemodynamics, and Doppler ultrasonography. In 1990, he was recruited as a full professor of experimental physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was director of the laboratory of biomedical engineering until 2001, then director of the laboratory of cell biophysics. His fields of research are cellular biophysics: cytoskeleton dynamics, motility & adhesion of cells and calcium dynamics in smooth muscle cells. He spent a sabbatical leave in 2000 at the famous Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts -USA to improve his skills in molecular and cellular biology. His teaching activities include courses in general physics, Newtonian mechanics, biomedical engineering and biophysics presented to undergraduate and graduate EPFL students in physics and engineering. He is author or co-author of more than 230 scientific papers & book chapters and 8 international patents.
