Pramod RastogiHe received his MSc degree from the University of Lucknow, MTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and doctorate degree from the University of Franche Comté in France. His research activities are principally in the area of holographic interferometry, speckle metrology, fiber optics sensors, phase shifting and moiré. He is the author or coauthor of more than 175 scientific papers of which more than 140 are published in peer-reviewed archival journals. He is also the author of book chapters, Encyclopaedia articles, and has edited several books in the field of optical metrology. His guest-edited three special sections on Optics in Switzerland for Optical Engineering in 1995 are even today an invaluable source of reference relative to optical engineering activities in Switzerland both at the academic and industrial levels. He has guest-edited over a dozen special dedicated issues in archival journals. He has also chaired and organized several international symposiums, such as, the International Conference on Applied Optical Metrology, Balatonfüred, Hungary, June 8-11, 1998; or the Conference on Trends in Optical Non-destructive Testing, Lugano, Switzerland, May 2-5, 2000, or the Conference on Advanced Phase Measurement Methods in Optics and Imaging, Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland, May 16-21, 2010 etc. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (1993) and a Fellow of the Society of the Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (1995). He is also a recipient of the Hetényi Award for the most significant research paper published in Experimental Mechanics in the year 1982.He was Elected as a Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) in 2014. He was recipient of the SPIE Dennis Gabor Award, 2014. The Dennis Gabor award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wave front technologies, especially those which further the development of holography and metrology applications. He was an honorary visiting Professor at the IIT Delhi between 1999 & 2003. Since 2000 he has also been active in laying groundwork for collaboration with the Indian Institutes of science and technology. Between the years 2000 & 2004, he was doing this as a part of his broader activity as in-charge of relations with Asia. His initiatives have led to academic exchange programs involving faculty and students with a view to fostering networking, research linkages and partnerships. To cite a few of his many initiatives: his active contribution to the holding of a high level Indo Swiss Workshop on Science & Technology at Bangalore in 2003; the setting up of ISJRP - the pilot project on bilateral partnership in S&T between Switzerland and India - in 2004; developing ISBRI (Indo-Swiss bilateral research initiative) in 2006; etc. He remained as the main coordinator of the Indo-Swiss Joint Research Program between the period covering the program's inception in 2004 until February 2011. He is currently responsible for developing academic and institutional relations with the universities in India and South-East Asian countries. He has been instrumental in helping to open up a range of opportunities to the EPFL students, such as, doing their "mobility" years at one of the IITs or, their final year major projects or internships at one of the Indian institutions/companies. Over a hundred EPFL students have benefited from these programs. He was instrumental in establishing Internship program with the aim of promoting an awareness of EPFL among the IIT students. This program has become very popular among the IIT and IIITA students with several hundreds of them having benefited from this program. He played a key role in the setting up of the EPFL-IIT Madras joint postgraduate course on "Technology and sustainable development" in 2000-01. He was the co-director of the last edition of the course which was held between January and April, 2008.
Christophe BallifChristophe Ballif is director of the Phototovoltaics and Thin Film Electronics Laboratoryb) (PV-Lab at the institute of microengineering (IMT) in Neuchâtel (part of the EPFL since 2009). The lab focus is on the science and technology of high efficiency heterojunction crystalline cells,so-called passivating contacts for solar cells, multi-junction solar cells include novel generation Perovskite on innovative optical high speed detector and on various macroelectronics application. It also deals with energy management with a focus on integration of solar electricity into the energy system. The PV-Lab has strongly contributed to technology transfer and industrialization of novel devices and full technology with numerous companies. Christophe Ballif graduated as a physicist from the EPFL in 1994, where he also obtained in 1998 his Phd degree working on novel PV materials. He accomplished his postdoctoral research at NREL (Golden, US) on compound semiconductor solar cells (CIGS and CdTe). He worked then at the Fraunhofer ISE (Ge) on crystalline silicon photovoltaics (monocrystalline and multi-crystalline) until 2003 and then at the EMPA in Thun (CH) before becoming full professor at the University of Neuchâtel IMT in 2004, taking over the chair of Prof. A. Shah. Since 2013, C.Ballif is also the director of the new CSEM PV-Center, also located in Neuchâtel. The CSEM PV-Center is focussing more on industrialisation and technology transfer in the field of solar energy, including solar electricity management and storage. At the core of the CSEM PV-center activities lies several "pilot lines" for various kinds of solar cells manufacturing, with a focus coating technologies, wet chemistry processes for crystalline silicon, metalisation techniques for solar cells, and a platform for developing "ideal packaging solutions and polymers" for PV modules. In addition, joined facitilites between CSEM and EPFL of over 800 m2 are available for modules manufacturing, measuring and accelerated aging. CSEM PV-center has also full team dedicated to storage and energy systems and operates a joined center with BFH in Biel for research on electrochemical storage. He (co-) authored over 500 journal and technical papers, as well as several patents. He is an elected member of the SATW, member of the scientific council of the Swiss AEE, and member of the board of the EPFL Energy center. In 2016, he recieved the Becquerel prize for his contributions to the field of high efficiency photovoltaics.
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.
Alireza KarimiAlireza Karimi received his B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1987 and 1990, respectively, from Amir Kabir University (Tehran Polytechnic). Then he received his DEA and Ph. D. degrees both on Automatic Control from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He was Assistant Professor at Electrical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology in Teheran from 1998 to 2000. Then he joined Automatic Laboratory of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, Switzerland. He is currently Professor of Automatic Control and the head of "Data-Driven Modelling and Control" group. His research interests include data-driven controller tuning and robust control with application to mechatronic systems and electrical grids.
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
Michel RappazAfter a PhD in solid state physics (1978) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a post-doc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Michel Rappaz joined the Institute of Materials of EPFL in 1981. After two years in an engineering company, he came back to EPFL in 1984 where he was nominated Adjunct Professor in 1990 and Full Professor in 2003. He retired from EPFL in 2015 and is now Emeritus Professor and independent consultant for several industries and research centres.
His main interests are in phase transformations and solidification, in particular the coupling of macroscopic aspects of heat and mass transfer with microscopic aspects of microstructure and defect formation. Among his diverse achievements, one can mention in particular the development of cellular automata for grain structure predictions and of granular models for hot tearing formation in castings, the coupling of Finite Element method with microscopic models of nucleation and growth, the application of the phase field method to the understanding of various microstructures, the discovery of quasicrystal mediated-nucleation in alloys, and many other studies both fundamental at the microstructure-defect level and more applied at the level of processes.
Some of the software developments have been commercialized by a spin-off company founded by his group in 1991 (Calcom SA), now part of the French company ESI. Michel Rappaz initiated in 1992 an annual postgraduate course on solidification which has been attended by more than 900 participants from all over the world. He is presently collaborating closely with another spin-off company started from his group, Novamet SàrL.
Michel Rappaz has received several awards, in particular the Mathewson co-author award (1994) and author award (1997) of the American Mineral, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), the Koerber foundation award jointly with Profs Y. Bréchet and M. Asbby (1996), the Sainte-Claire Deville Medal (1996) and the Grand Medal (2011) from the French Materials Society, the Bruce Chalmers Award of TMS (2002), the Mc Donald Memorial Lecture award of Canada (2005), the FEMS European Materials Gold Medal (2013) and the Brimacombe Prize of TMS (2015). He is a highly-cited author of ISI, a fellow of ASM, IOP and TMS, and has co-authored more than 200 publications and two books.
