Rüdiger UrbankeRüdiger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 1990 and the M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences (I&C) of EPFL. He is a member of the Information Processing Group. He is principally interested in the analysis and design of iterative coding schemes, which allow reliable transmission close to theoretical limits at low complexities. Such schemes are part of most modern communications standards, including wireless transmission, optical communication and hard disk storage. More broadly, his research focuses on the analysis of graphical models and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications. From 2000-2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and he is currently on the board of the series "Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory." In 2017 he was President of the Information Theory Society. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&C doctoral school, in 2013 he served as Dean a. i. of I&C, and since 2016 he is the Associated Dean for teaching of I&C. He is a co-author of the book "Modern Coding Theory" published by Cambridge University Press. Awards: 2021 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2016 STOC Best Paper Award 2014 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2014 IEEE Hamming Medal 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award 2011 MASCO Best Paper Award 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award 2009 La Polysphere Teaching Award 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award Fulbright Scholarship My students have won the following awards: M. Mondelli, 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award M. Mondelli, EPFL Doctorate Award 2018 M. Mondelli, Patrick Denantes Award, 2017 M. Mondelli, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2015 M. Mondelli, Dan David Prize Scholarship, 2015 H. Hassani, Inaugural Thomas Cover Dissertation Award, 2014 S. Kudekar, 2013 & 2021 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award A. Karbasi, Patrick Denantes Award, 2013 V. Venkatesan, Best Paper Award at MASCOTS, 2011 A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP, 2011 (with R. Parhizkar) A. Karbasi, Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGMETRICS, 2010 (with S. Oh) S. Korada, ABB Dissertation Award, 2010 S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2009 (with E. Sasoglu) S. Korada, IEEE IT Society Student Paper Award at ISIT, 2008
Alfredo PasquarelloAlfredo Pasquarello studied physics at the
Scuola Normale Superiore
of Pisa and at the University of Pisa, obtaining their respective degrees in 1986. He obtained a doctoral degree at the EPFL in 1991 with a thesis on
Multiphoton Transitions in Solids
. Then, he moved to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill (New Jersey), where he carried out postdoctoral research on the magnetic properties of carbon fullerenes. In 1993, he joined the Institute for Numerical Research in the Physics of Materials (IRRMA), where his activity involved first-principles simulation methods. In 1998, he was awarded the EPFL Latsis Prize for his research work on disordered silica materials. Succeeding in grant programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he then set up his own research group at IRRMA. In July 2003, he is appointed Professor in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at EPFL. Currently, he leads the Chair of Atomic Scale Simulation.
Michele CeriottiMichele Ceriotti received his Ph.D. in Physics from ETH Zürich in 2010. He spent three years in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College. Since 2013 he leads the laboratory for Computational Science and Modeling in the Institute of Materials at EPFL. His research revolves around the atomic-scale modelling of materials, based on the sampling of quantum and thermal fluctuations and on the use of machine learning to predict and rationalize structure-property relations. He has been awarded the IBM Research Forschungspreis in 2010, the Volker Heine Young Investigator Award in 2013, an ERC Starting Grant in 2016, and the IUPAP C10 Young Scientist Prize in 2018.
Berend SmitBerend Smit received an MSc in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and an MSc in Physics both from the Technical University in Delft (the Netherlands). He received in 1990 cum laude PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He was a (senior) Research Physicists at Shell Research from 1988-1997, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 1997-2007.
In 2004 Berend Smit was elected Director of the European Center of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) Lyon France. Since 2007 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley and Faculty Chemist at Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2014 he has been director of the Energy Center at EPFL.
