Florence Graezer BideauSenior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities and at the School of Architecture, EPFLVisiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino PhD in History and Civilization (EHESS, Paris) Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies (MACS) between 2012 and 2016Member of the Research group Heritage, culture and the cityAssociated researcher at the China Room Research Group and South China-Torino Collaboration Lab, Politecnico di Torino Associate member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale (LACS), UNIL Member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL Florence Graezer Bideau trained as an anthropologist and a sinologist, and received her PhD in History and Civilization in 2005. Before joining the Centre for Area and Cultural Studies (CACS) at EPFL in 2010, she was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne, where she taught courses in cultural theory and fieldwork methodology. She is Senior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities where she teaches area studies, anthropology of China, critical heritage studies and urban studies. She has been acting as Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies between 2012 and 2016 and she is currently a member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL. Since 2015, Florence has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her fields of expertise include anthropology of China, urban sociology, modes of sociability and governmentality. Florence’s research is on the relation between culture and power (making of cultural policy in China; emergence of maker movement (makerspaces) and politics of innovation in China), heritage issues (process of heritagization and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore; implementation of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland; historic urban landscape in heritage policy of Beijing, Rome and Mexico City), and the making of the city (informal resistances toward the violence of urbanism in Caracas, Chennai and Guangzhou; uses of public spaces in Chinese new towns).
Olivier MartinOlivier J.F. Martin received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1989 and 1994, respectively, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. In 1989, he joined IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he investigated thermal and optical properties of semiconductor laser diodes. Between 1994 and 1997 he was a research staff member at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). In 1997 he received a Lecturer fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). During the period 1996-1999, he spent a year and a half in the U.S.A., as invited scientist at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). In 2001 he received a Professorship grant from the SNSF and became Professor of Nano-Optics at the ETHZ. In 2003, he was appointed Professor of Nanophotonics and Optical Signal Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), where he is currently head of the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory and Director of the Microengineering Section.
Martin VetterliMartin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.
Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.
Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.
Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.
Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.
Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.
He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.
