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.
Ursula RöthlisbergerU. Röthlisberger was born in Solothurn (Switzerland). In 1988 she made her diploma in Physical Chemistry in the group of Prof. Ernst Schumacher at the University of Berne (Switzerland). Her Ph.D. thesis was done in collaboration with Dr. Wanda Andreoni at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon. After finishing her Ph.D in 1991 she spent some time as a postdoctoral research assistant at the IBM Research Lab. From 1992-1995 she was a postdoctoral research assistant in the group of Prof. Michael L. Klein at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA). In 1994 she was awarded an advanced researcher fellowship (Profil 2) from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Before starting her Profile 2-fellowship she spent another year as postdoctoral research assistant in the group of Prof. Michele Parrinello at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1996 she moved as Profile 2-fellow to the ETH in Zurich, hosted by the group of Prof. Wilfred F. van Gunsteren. In 1997 she became Assistant Professor of Computer-Aided Inorganic Chemistry at the ETH Zurich.
Laurent VillardOriginaire de Vauffelin (BE), Laurent Villard est né en 1961. Après avoir obtenu le diplôme d'ingénieur physicien de l'EPFL en 1983, il est assistant au CRPP où il entame une thèse. Ses études portent sur l'étude théorique du chauffage des plasmas par ondes radiofréquences, développant pour cela un code de calcul numérique sous contrat avec le Joint European Torus (JET, Angleterre). Il obtient en 1987 le doctorat ès sciences. En 1988, il est engagé en tant que chargé de cours à l'Université d'Addis Abeba, enseignant l'électromagnétisme et l'électrodynamique. En 1989 et 1990, il rejoint le Polytechnic Education Development Centre de l'Institute of Technology of Bandung (ITB, Indonésie). Ses activités contribuent à la formation et au soutien du personnel enseignant des dix-sept écoles polytechniques nouvellement créées en Indonésie. A la fin 1990, il revient au CRPP en tant que collaborateur scientifique. En 1993 il est nommé professeur assistant. En 1999, il est nommé maître d'enseignement et de recherche, puis, en 2005, professeur titulaire. En collaboration avec JET et General Atomics (USA) il étudie les instabilités qui peuvent être provoquées par les particules énergétiques issues du processus de fusion nucléaire. Avec des scientifiques du Keldysh Institute (Moscou), il s'intéresse au calcul de l'équilibre et de la stabilité de configurations du type tokamak. Enfin, en collaboration notamment avec le Max-Planck Institute fuer Plasma Physik, ses recherches portent sur la simulation numérique, par calcul à haute performance (HPC), de la turbulence dans les plasmas magnétisés.
David Atienza AlonsoDavid Atienza Alonso is an associate professor of EE and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers and edge AI architectures. Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 350 papers, one book, and 12 patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and award, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned two best paper awards at the VLSI-SoC 2009 and CST-HPCS 2012 conference, and five best paper award nominations at the DAC 2013, DATE 2013, WEHA-HPCS 2010, ICCAD 2006, and DAC 2004 conferences. He serves or has served as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019 and was GOLD member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CASS from 2010 to 2012. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM and an IEEE Fellow.
Joaquim Loizu CisquellaJoaquim Loizu graduated in Physics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, carrying out his Master thesis project at the Center for Bio-Inspired Technology, Imperial College London, on the theoretical and numerical study of the biophysics of light-sensitive neurons. In 2009, he started his PhD studies with Prof. Paolo Ricci at the Swiss Plasma Center, the major plasma and fusion laboratory in Switzerland. His thesis focused on the theory of plasma-wall interactions and their effect on the mean flows and turbulence in magnetized plasmas. He obtained his PhD in December 2013. In 2014, he joined the Max-Planck-Princeton Center for plasma research as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, spending one year at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and one year at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. During this time, he worked on three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics, studying the formation of singular currents and magnetic islands at rational surfaces. In 2016, he obtained a two-years Eurofusion Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out research at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. During this time, he focused on the computation of 3D MHD equilibria in stellarators, including the possibility of magnetic islands and magnetic field-line chaos. In 2018, he joined the Swiss Plasma Center as a Scientist and Lecturer. He is also one of the leaders of the Simons Collaboration on Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy. His current research interests include MHD equilibrium and stability, magnetic reconnection, self-organization, non-neutral plasmas, plasma sheaths, and plasma transport in chaotic magnetic fields.
Babak FalsafiBabak is a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the founding director of the EcoCloud, an industrial/academic consortium at EPFL investigating scalable data-centric technologies. He has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), snoop filters and memory streaming technologies that are incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P and Q and ARM cores, and computer system performance evaluation methodologies that have been in use by AMD, HP and Google PerKit . He has shown that hardware memory consistency models are neither necessary (in the 90's) nor sufficient (a decade later) to achieve high performance in multiprocessor systems. These results eventually led to fence speculation in modern microprocessors. His latest work on workload-optimized server processors laid the foundation for the first generation of Cavium ARM server CPUs, ThunderX. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.
