Nicolas GrandjeanNicolas Grandjean received a PhD degree in physics from the University ofNice Sophia Antipolis in 1994 and shortly thereafter joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a permanent staff member. In 2004, he was appointed tenure-track assistant professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he created the Laboratory for advanced semiconductors for photonics and electronics. He was promoted to full professor in 2009. He was the director of the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics from 2012 to 2016 and then moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara where he spent 6 months as a visiting professor. Since 2018, he is the head of the School of Physics at the EPFL. He was awarded the Sandoz Family Foundation Grant for Academic Promotion, received the “Nakamura Lecturer” Award in 2010, the "Quantum Devices Award” at the 2017 Compound Semiconductor Week, and “2016 best teacher” award from the EPFL Physics School. His research interests are focused on the physics of nanostructures and III-V nitride semiconductor quantum photonics.
Simon Nessim HeneinBorn in 1973 and of Egyptian-Swiss nationality, Simon Henein grew up in Cairo. He obtained an engineering degree at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 1996 and went on to complete his doctorate at the EPFL in 2000. In 2001, he published the book “Conception des guidages flexibles” which has become a reference in precision engineering. He then joined the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchatel, Switzerland, where he conceived and developed mechanisms for robotic, aerospace, medical and watchmaking applications. He pursued his research career at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland, where he developed instruments for the Swiss Light Source Synchrotron (SLS). Since November 1st, 2012, he is associate professor in microengineering at the EPFL, holder of the Patek Philippe Chair and director of the Micromechanical and horological design laboratory (Instant-Lab).
Benoît Marie Joseph DeveaudBenoit Deveaud is now Research Director at Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau (France)
Benoît Deveaud was born in France in 1952. In 1971, he enters Ecole Polytechnique in Paris where he specializes in physics. In 1974, he joins the National Center for research in Telecommunications (CNET).
He undertakes at the same time studies on the main impurity centers in III-V semiconductors, and continues his studies in physics by preparing a diploma in solid state physics in Rennes. In 1984, he defends his PhD thesis at the University of Grenoble, under the supervision of Gérard Martinez. Meanwhile, his team gets interested in semiconductor microstructures and launches studies on the structural and optical properties of superlattices based on gallium arsenide. These studies highlight for example vertical transport in superlattices as well as the quantification of excitonic energies in a quantum well.
In 1986 he joins the team of Daniel Chemla in Bell Laboratories (Holmdel, USA) and takes part in the development of the first luminescence set-up having a temporal resolution better than 1 picosecond. He studies then ultrafast processes in quantum wells.
Returning to France in 1988, at CNET, he coaches a laboratory of high-speed studies, interested in the optical and electronic properties of semiconductor materials.
Appointed professor in Physics at EPFL in October 1993, his research team studies the physics of ultrafast processes in semiconductor micro and nanostructures and in devices that use them. He has been the Director the Institute of Micro and Optoelectronics since 1998, then of the Institute of Quantum Photonic and Electronics from 2003 to 2008.
His team takes an active part in the "Quantum Photonics" National Center of Competence in Research, of which he was the Deputy Director from 2001 to 2005 then the Director from July 2005 till the end of the NCCR in 2013
From 2008 till 2014 he has been Dean for Research at EPFL and president of the research commission.
Starting in 2014, he has been head of Physics, till his departure from EPFL in 2017.
He has been a divisional editor of Physical Review Letters from 2001 to 2007.
Luis Guillermo Villanueva TorrijoGuillermo Villanueva is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausane (EPFL), Switzerland, in the Mechanical Engineering Institute (IGM). Before joining EPFL he was a Marie Curie post-doctoral scholar at DTU (Denmark) and Caltech (California, US); and before a post-doc at EPFL-LMIS1. He received his M.Sc. in Physics in Zaragoza (Spain) and his PhD from the UAB in Barcelona (Spain).
Since the start of his PhD (2002), Prof. Villanueva has been active in the fields of NEMS/MEMS for sensing, having expertise from the design and fabrication to the characterization and applicability. He has co-authored more than 75 papers in peer-reviewed journals (h-index of 24 WoK, 32 GoS) and more than 100 contributions to international conferences.
He is serving, or has served, on the program committees of IEEE-NEMS, IEEE-Sensors, MNE, IEEE-FCS and Transducers. He is editor of Microelectronic Engineering. He has co-organized MNE2014 and SNC2015; and he is currently co-organizing the short courses at Transducers 2019 and the 16th International Workshop on Nanomechanical Sensors (NMC2019).
Aurelio BayAurelio Bay graduated in physics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in 1980 and got his PhD degree from the same institution in 1986 for a work on the determination of the axial form factor of the ? meson.
He then went to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (LBL), USA as a post doc for two years, where he worked on the TPC/2? Electromagnetic Calorimeter and the SSC/LHC detector. He then came back to Europe and was named Maître Assistant at University of Geneva till 1994, where he started working at the L3 experiment of LEP at CERN.
He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne in 1994 and Full Professor in 1998, continuing working at LEP, LEP2 and LHCb at CERN , and starting a collaboration at BELLE experiment at KEK, Tsukuba (Japan).
At the University of Lausanne he was Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Deputy Director of the Physics Department and Deputy of the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences.
In 2003, following the merge of UNIL physics department into the EPFL School of Basic Sciences, he was appointed Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Director of the EPFL Laboratory of High Energy Physics.
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
Nico de RooijNico de Rooij is Professor Emeritus of EPFL and previous Vice-President of CSEM SA. He was Professor of Microengineering at EPFL and Head of the Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Laboratory (
SAMLAB
) from 2009 to 2016. At
CSEM SA
he was responsible for the EPFL CSEM coordination from 2012 to 2016. His research activities include the design, micro fabrication and application of miniaturized silicon based sensors, actuators, and microsystems. He authored and coauthored over 400 published
journal papers
in these areas.
He was Professor at the University of Neuchatel and Head of the Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems Laboratory (SAMLAB) from 1982 to 2008. Since October 1990 till October 1996 and again from October 2002 until June 2008, he has been the director of the Institute of Microtechnology of the University of Neuchatel (IMT UniNE). He lectured at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ), and since 1989, he has been a part-time professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). He has been appointed Vice-President of the CSEM SA in February 2008 and headed the newly created Microsystems Technology Division of CSEM SA, from 2008 until 2012. He was Director of EPFL's Institute of Microengineering (EPFL STI IMT) from 2009 to 2012, following the transfer of IMT Uni-NE to EPFL.
Dr. de Rooij is a Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). He recieved the IEEE
Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Gold Medal
, the Schlumberger Prize as well as the
MNE Fellow Award 2016
. He was awarded a Visiting Investigatorship Program (VIP) in MEMS/NEMS Systems by the
A*STAR Science and Engineering Council (SERC)
, Singapore, hosted by
SIMTech
, for the period 2005-2008.
Prof. de Rooij is Corresponding Member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
and Individual Member of the
Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences
.
He has been serving on the Editorial Boards of the
IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems (IEEE JMEMS)
,
the IEEE proceedings
,
the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, JM & M,
,
the Sensors and Actuators
,and
Sensors and Materials
. He was Member of the Information and Communication technology jury of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards from 2009 to 2012.
Dr. de Rooij is (or was) Member of numerous international steering committees of conference series as well as
technical paper review panels including the steering committee of the International Conference on Solid-State
Sensors and Actuators and of Eurosensors. He acted as European Program Chairman of Transducers '87 and General Chairman of Transducers '89, Montreux, Switzerland.
He has supervised more than 70 Ph.D. students, who have successfully completed their
Ph.D. thesis.
He received his M.Sc. degree in physical chemistry from the State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, in 1975, and a Ph.D. degree from Twente University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1978. From 1978 to 1982, he worked at the Research and Development Department of Cordis Europa N.V., The Netherlands.
Mihai Adrian IonescuAdrian M. Ionescu is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received the B.S./M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 1989 and 1997, respectively. He has held staff and/or visiting positions at LETI-CEA, Grenoble, France and INP Grenoble, France and Stanford University, USA, in 1998 and 1999. Dr. Ionescu has published more than 600 articles in international journals and conferences. He received many Best Paper Awards in international conferences, the Annual Award of the Technical Section of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1994 and the Blondel Medal in 2009 for contributions to the progress in engineering sciences in the domain of electronics. He is the 2013 recipient of the IBM Faculty Award in Engineering. He served the IEDM and VLSI conference technical committees and was the Technical Program Committee (Co)Chair of ESSDERC in 2006 and 2013. He is a member of the SATW. He is director of the Laboratory of Micro/Nanoelectronic Devices (NANOLAB).
