Diego GhezziProf. Diego Ghezzi holds the Medtronic Chair in Neuroengineering at the School of Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He received his M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering (2004) and Ph.D. in Bioengineering (2008) from Politecnico di Milano. From 2008 to 2013, he completed his postdoctoral training at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova at the Department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies; where he was promoted to Researcher in 2013. In 2015, he was appointed as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics and Institute of Bioengineering.
Nicolae ChiurtuNicolae Chiurtu received his Dipl. El.-Ing. degree from the Electronics and Telecommunications Faculty, University "Politehnica" Bucharest, Romania, in 1996, and the Master of Science degree from the same university, in 1997. From 1997 to 1998, he was a pre-doctoral student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Communications Systems Division (SSC). He received his Ph.D. degree in communication systems from EPFL in 2003. His thesis work investigated multiple antenna (MIMO) systems for mobile communications and was awarded the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation prize for "significant advancements in the understanding of MIMO systems usefulness in wireless communications". From March 2003 to October 2004 he worked on the design and implementation of a MIMO system with LDPC coding on the Software Radio platform developed in the Mobile Communications Laboratory (LCM) at EPFL. From 2005 to 2006 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the Smart Antennas Research Group (SARG) doing research on OFDMA networks, and also a consultant for a WiMax (IEEE 802.16e standard) startup in Silicon Valley. He is co-author of two US patents and published a dozen of articles in international scientific publications. His research interests include, among other topics, multiple antenna techniques, OFDMA systems, signal processing, information theory, WiMax and LTE systems, relay-based cooperative networks, localization systems and software defined radios.
Joaquim Loizu CisquellaJoaquim Loizu graduated in Physics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, carrying out his Master thesis project at the Center for Bio-Inspired Technology, Imperial College London, on the theoretical and numerical study of the biophysics of light-sensitive neurons. In 2009, he started his PhD studies with Prof. Paolo Ricci at the Swiss Plasma Center, the major plasma and fusion laboratory in Switzerland. His thesis focused on the theory of plasma-wall interactions and their effect on the mean flows and turbulence in magnetized plasmas. He obtained his PhD in December 2013. In 2014, he joined the Max-Planck-Princeton Center for plasma research as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, spending one year at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and one year at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. During this time, he worked on three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics, studying the formation of singular currents and magnetic islands at rational surfaces. In 2016, he obtained a two-years Eurofusion Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out research at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. During this time, he focused on the computation of 3D MHD equilibria in stellarators, including the possibility of magnetic islands and magnetic field-line chaos. In 2018, he joined the Swiss Plasma Center as a Scientist and Lecturer. He is also one of the leaders of the Simons Collaboration on Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy. His current research interests include MHD equilibrium and stability, magnetic reconnection, self-organization, non-neutral plasmas, plasma sheaths, and plasma transport in chaotic magnetic fields.
Paolo RicciPaolo Ricci earned his masters degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy) in 2000. His doctoral studies were conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with focus on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. He spent two-and-a-half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he worked on gyrokinetic simulations of the Z pinch. He joined the EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), as a EURATOM fellow in 2006, was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in June 2010, and Associate Professor in August 2016. He is at the head of the SPC theory group. Paolo Ricci is the recipient of the 2016 Section de Physique Teaching Prize and of the 2021 Craie d'Or award from the EPFL physics bachelor students.
