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.
Peter MonkewitzAfter graduating in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1977 with a thesis on internal acoustics. From 1977-80 he was a research associate in the Aerospace Department of the Univ. of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he worked experimentally and theoretically on jet noise and hydrodynamic instabilities. In 1980 he joined the faculty of the School of Engineering at UCLA where he made research contributions in several areas. In the field of hydrodynamic instability he had a hand in the popularization of the concept of absolute instability in fluid mechanics, the development of the concept as well as of the asymptotic analytical description of global modes in nonparallel flows, and in the modelling of vortex shedding from bluff bodies. Other areas of research include internal acoustics, jet mixing, in particular in low-density jets in which he co-discovered enhanced mixing by "side-jets," flow control, transition to turbulence, turbulence and, most recently, flame instabilities. In 1988 he was awarded the Humboldt prize and spent the academic year 1989/90 as Humboldt awardee at the Technical University in Berlin. In 1992 he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Since 1993 he holds the chair for experimental fluid mechanics and heads the Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics (LMF) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He has been Chairman of its Mechanical Engineering Department from July 1997 to December 2000, co-organizer of the 1999 Research programme on turbulence at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics from 1995 to 2000 and a member of the EUROMECH Council. He is currently an Associate Editor of Physics of Fluids , a member of the IUTAM general assembly, a member of the schoolwide EPFL Academic Promotions Committee and part-time "program monitor" for the Swiss National Science Foundation (member of its Research Council).
Philippe RenaudPhilippe Renaud is Professor at the Microsystem Laboratory (LMIS4) at EPFL. He is also the scientific director of the EPFL Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMI). His main research area is related to micronano technologies in biomedical applications (BioMEMS) with emphasis on cell-chips, nanofluidics and bioelectronics. Ph. Renaud is invloved in many scientifics papers in his research area. He received his diploma in physics from the University of Neuchâtel (1983) and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Lausanne (1988). He was postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley (1988-89) and then at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory in Switzerland (1990-91). In 1992, he joined the Sensors and Actuators group of the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) at Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was appointed assistant professor at EPFL in 1994 and full professor in 1997. In summer 1996, he was visiting professor at the Tohoku University, Japan. Ph. Renaud is active in several scientific committee (scientific journals, international conferences, scientific advisory boards of companies, PhD thesis committee). He is also co-founder of the Nanotech-Montreux conference. Ph. Renaud is committed to valorization of basic research through his involvement in several high-tech start-up companies.
