Mohammad RahiminejadMohammad Rahiminejad is a third-year Ph.D. student in the doctoral program of Mechanics at EPFL. His main research centers on building physics and examines how the thermo-hydrodynamic behavior of airflow in a ventilated cavity behind traditional and modern (BIPV) external claddings impacts the thermal performance of the entire building envelope. To tackle this topic, he takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses numerical analyses, CFD simulations, and experimental measurements. Before joining EPFL, he worked as a project manager assistant in Shiraz, Iran, on quite a few industrial projects including the design of the ventilation systems of Tehran-Shomal Freeway, design of the air conditioning systems of Shiraz subway, and design of the air exhaust and jet fan systems of the Shiraz longest underpass. He holds a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, where he investigated water purification through monolayer graphene membranes using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation. In his bachelor's degree in Shiraz University, he successfully achieved publishing a journal paper in the field of biomechanics that addressed the distribution of the pressure and velocity fields in the human upper airway during sneezing using CFD simulations.
Luisa PastoreWith a background in Architectural Engineering, Luisa specialised in sustainable architecture, bioclimatic design and comfort in buildings through a PhD from the University of Palermo (2013) followed by a Post-doc at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID) of EPFL (2014-2019).She is currently a Scientific Collaborator at the Smart Living Lab - EPFL and professor of Material Behaviour and Architecture and Energy Concept at the Ecole d’Architecture et d’Architecture d’Intérieur – idées House of Lausanne.She also works as Coordinator for the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction where she acts as a liaison between the Academic Committee and the core Management Office of the Foundation. Besides the coordination of the AC's agenda, she supports the organization of events and competitions for the promotion of innovative sustainable design solutions that can tackle today's environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural issues affecting the built environment.Since 2021 she has also joined Amber Lion Partners as Impact and Sustainability Advisor.
Lyesse LalouiDirector, EPFL Soil Mechanics LaboratoryDirector, EPFL Civil Engineering SectionEditor in Chief, ElsevierMember of the Swiss Academy of Engineering SciencesFounding Partner, Geoeg & MeduSoilActive in academic research in the following institutions: Lausanne, EPFL, Durham, Duke University, Nanjing, Hohai UniversityProfessor Lyesse Laloui teaches at EPFL, where he directs the Soil Mechanics Laboratory as well as the Civil Engineering Section. He is a founding partner of the international engineering company Geoeg, and the start-up MeduSoil. In addition, he is an adjunct professor at Duke University, USA and an advisory professor at Hohai University, China as well as honorary director of the International Joint Research Center for Energy Geotechnics in China.He is the recipient of an Advance ERC grant for his BIO-mediated GEO-material Strengthening project. Editor in Chief of the Elsevier Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment journal, he is a leading scientist in the field of geomechanics and geo-energy. He has written and edited 13 books and published over 320 peer reviewed papers; his work is cited more than 6000 times with an h-index of 39 (Scopus). Two of his papers are among the top 1% in the academic field of Engineering. He has given keynote and invited lectures at more than 40 leading international conferences. He has received several international awards (IACMAG, RM Quigley, Roberval) and delivered honorary lectures (Vardoulakis, Minnesota; G.A. Leonards, Purdue; Kersten, Minnesota). He recently acted as the Chair of the international evaluation panel of Civil and Geological Engineering R&D Units of Portugal.Nov. 2019 For further information visit www.epfl.ch/labs/lms/ ; geoeg.net ; medusoil.com Sneha JainSneha Jain is currently conducting her PhD thesis on the influence of ocular characteristics and colour of light on discomfort glare from daylight at workplaces. She completed her undergraduate degree in architecture and has a Master of Science in Building Science from International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India. Her Master thesis was on Daylight glare estimation for open-loop window roller shade control system to optimize daylight levels and visual comfort in a lab setup. She also worked as a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California. Her current work focuses on improving the prediction of current discomfort glare models.
Colin Neil JonesColin Jones is an Associate Professor in the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He was a Senior Researcher at the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zurich until 2011 and obtained a PhD in 2005 from the University of Cambridge for his work on polyhedral computational methods for constrained control. Prior to that, he was at the University of British Columbia in Canada, where he took a BASc and MASc in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics. Colin has worked in a variety of industrial roles, ranging from commercial building control to the development of custom optimization tools focusing on retail human resource scheduling. His current research interests are in the theory and computation of predictive control and optimization, and their application to green energy generation, distribution and management.
Ian SmithPhD, Cambridge University, 1982 Interests 1 Active shape control for structures for deployment and where serviceability criteria governs 2 Biomimetic structures (learning, self-diagnosis, self-repair) 3 Infrastructure management support through structural identification 4 Advanced computer-aided engineering applications of stochastic optimization and search, multi-criteria analysis, system uncertainties (measurement and modelling), multi-modal approaches (combining statistics with behavior models) More details : see https://www.epfl.ch/labs/imac/research/iansmith/ Maher KayalMaher Kayal received M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) in 1983 and 1989 respectively. He has been with the Electronics laboratories of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) since 1990, where he is currently a professor and director of the Energy Management and Sustainability" section. He has published many scientific papers, coauthor of three text books dedicated to mixed-mode CMOS design and he holds eleven patents. His technical contributions have been in the area of analog and Mixed-signal circuits design including highly linear and tunable sensors microsystems, signal processing and green energy management.
Prizes and Honors
Electronics Letters journal Premium Award 2013,
Outstanding Paper Award? IEEE Mixdes 2013
Basil Papadias paper Award, IEEE Powertech 2013
Best Paper Awards, Mixdes 2013
Best Paper Awards, ICCAS 2012
Outstanding Paper Award- IEEE Mixdes 2012.
Poland Section IEEE ED Chapter special award in 2011.
Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching- 2009.
The William M. Portnoy Award at the Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition , California Sept 2009.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-Mixdes 2009.
High Quality Paper - IEEE Power Tech Conference June 2009.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-Mixdes 2007.
Best Paper Award - IEEE-TTTC International Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, Robotics - 2006.
Best Application Specific Integrated Circuit at the International European Design and Test Conference ED&TC - 1997.
Ascom Award for the Best Work in Telecommunication Fields 1990.
Publications Books.
Books:
Methodology for the Digital Calibration of Analog Circuits and Systems, Marc Pastre & Maher Kayal. Springer Publisher- (ISBN 1-4020-4252-3)-2006.
Structured Analog CMOS Design, Danica Stefanovic & Maher Kayal. Springer Publisher-(ISBN 978-1-4020-8572-7)-2008.
Linear CMOS RF Amplifiers for Wireless Applications, Maher Kayal, Springer Publisher. (ISBN 978-90-481-9360-8)-2010.
Coeditor of Microelectronics Education Kluwer Academic Publishers. (ISBN 1-4020-2072-4). -2004.
Thomas LieblingThomas M. Liebling (http://roso.epfl.ch) is Mathematics Professor Emeritus at EPFL (Lausanne), where he taught from 1980 to 2008 and directed the OR group ROSO.
He served on the jury of 112 PhD and habilitation theses, 39 as director. He further supervised 150 MS theses and 350 term projects, many of which in collaboration with industry and private and public services. He published over 200 refereed papers, books, and book chapters.
Previous appointments were with ETHZ, and RPI; as visiting professor with Cornell, ELTE-Budapest, MIT, PUC-Rio, and Stanford.
He received his education from ETH Zurich:
MS in EE (1966, automatic control),
PhD in operations research (1969; awarded the ETH prize and medal).
Mathematics habilitation (1973) with a pioneering probabilistic study on the number of iterations of the simplex method.
Postdoctoral fellowship (1970/71) Stanford University with G.B. Dantzig
He holds the Science Prize of the German OR Society, is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and the Scientific Council of ZIB, Berlin.
He received a honorary degree from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima and the Medal of Merit from EPN Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito.
Editorial activities: DE (Optimization and Networks) of Management Science, AE of Operations Research, OR-letters, OR-Spectrum, EJOR, Discrete Applied Optimization, and Math. Programming, recurring guest-editor of MPB and DAM.
He is Editor in Chief of the MOS-SIAM book series on optimization.
He is a founding organizer of the Aussois Workshops in Combinatorial Optimization, and member of the steering committee of LAGOS (Latin American Graphs, Optimizstion Symposium) chaired the MPS Publications Committee, Tucker Prize Committee, and presently chairs its Symposium Advisory Committee. He organized ISMP 1997 at EPFL, with nearly 1500 participants from 63 countries, the largest to date. He has chaired the Conference of Department Chairmen (a position comparable to a provost), the Computer Commission (responsible for the introduction at EPFL of the first Swiss supercomputer), and further chaired the Research Commission over 6 years, he created the Doctoral Award and was its first Jury chair. He belonged to the Board of Trustees of the Swiss National Science Foundation .
Much of his research lies at the interface with other disciplines (physics, life sciences, materials science, management, engineering, logistics), focusing on complex systems modeling, simulation, and optimization.
His present research interests are in algorithmic game theory and complex particle system modeling and simulation using paradigms from mathematical programming, discrete geometry and probability. Rachid GuerraouiRachid Guerraoui has been affiliated with Ecole des Mines of Paris, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique of Saclay, Hewlett Packard Laboratories and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked in a variety of aspects of distributed computing, including distributed algorithms and distributed programming languages. He is most well known for his work on (e-)Transactions, epidemic information dissemination and indulgent algorithms.
He co-authored a book on Transactional Systems (Hermes) and a book on reliable distributed programming (Springer). He was appointed program chair of ECOOP 1999, ACM Middleware 2001, IEEE SRDS 2002, DISC 2004 and ACM PODC 2010.
His publications are available at http://lpdwww.epfl.ch/rachid/papers/generalPublis.html 