Ileana-Cristina Benea-ChelmusIleana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus is an Assistant Professor of Microengineering at the Institute of Electro and Microengineering at EPFL since January 2022. She is also a Research Associate affiliated with the group of Prof. Federico Capasso at Harvard University.
Prior to her appointment, she was a Postdoctoral scientist and SNF fellow in the group of Prof. Federico Capasso at Harvard University, USA in the John A. Harvard school of engineering and applied sciences since March 2019 to December 2021. She lead efforts on tunable metasurfaces enabled by nonlinear optics, supported through a personal grant from the Hans-Eggenberger Foundation. Apart from science, she was actively driving advocacy work within the postdoctoral association at Harvard.
She holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (2010) and a Master Degree with distinction in Optics and Photonics (2013) – both from KIT, Germany. During her master, she spent one year at EPFL (2011) as an ERASMUS Exchange student in Physics, where she acquired in-depth knowledge of solid-state physics, quantum mechanics and biotechnology. During her Bachelor, she received a stipend from the Anna-Ruths Foundation. In the summer of 2009, she was awarded a research stipend from DAAD “Rise in North America” to perform a summer internship at Vanderbilt University, TN, and became a scholar of SyBBURE. For her Master studies, Ileana-Cristina was awarded an excellence stipend from the Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics which she absolved with merits. She was selected to participate in extended carrier building programs such as "Female talents at IBM and KIT" as well as "Femtec". She did a summer internship at IMEC in Belgium and IBM Research in Zurich under the supervision of Dr. Armin Knoll. For her Master thesis she decided to join the group of Prof. Jérôme Faist and work on terahertz quantum cascade lasers and their applications in spectroscopy. She continued with her Ph.D. thesis in the same lab on quantum science. She started very early to drive a substantial proportion of the research work done in the framework of an ERC Advanced grant. She developed, as the first one in this field, the research branch of time-domain quantum optics at terahertz frequencies. She developed ultrasensitive time-domain detectors.
She received several awards so far
2021
PRIMA independent research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation,
2019
Hans Eggenberger Prize and Independent Project Grant (Junior Principal Investigator),
2019
SNSF Early Mobility Fellowship Grant,
2019
Ph.D. thesis prize of the European Physical Society – QEOD (awarded every two years),
2019
Ph.D. thesis prize from the Swiss Physical Society in the area of Metrology (awarded every year),
2017
1st place best student presentation award at IRMMW, Cancun, Mexico,
2017
best student paper award at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco, USA,
2016
best student paper award at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco, USA,
2012
KSOP master scholarship,
2011
FEMTEC career building program for female students in STEM fields,
2010
IBM and KIT female talents,
2009
DAAD Rise in North America
2009
SyBBURE for summer internship at Vanderbilt, TN, USA,
2008
Anna-Ruths undergraduate scholarship.
She engages with various communities, centers and associations at EPFL and Harvard.
Jean-Philippe AnsermetJean-Philippe Ansermet was born March 1, 1957 in Lausanne (legal origin Vaumarcus, NE). He obtained a diploma as physics engineer of EPFL in 1980. He went on to get a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where, from 1985 to 1987, he persued as post-doc with Prof. Slichter his research on catalysis by solid state NMR studies of molecules bound to the surface of catalysts. From 1987 to 1992 he worked at the materials research center of Ciba-Geigy, on polymers for microelectronics, composites, dielectrics and organic charge transfer complexes. In March 1992, as professor of experimental physics, he developed a laboratory on the theme of nanostructured materials and turned full professor in 1995. Since 1992, he teaches classical mechanics, first to future engineering students, since 2004 to physics majors. Since 2000, he teaches thermodynamics also, to the same group of students. He offers a graduate course in spintronics, and another on spin dynamics. His research activities concern the fabrication and properties of magnetic nanostructures produced by electrodeposition. His involvement since the early days of spintronics have allowed him to gain recognition for his work on giant magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR), magnetic relaxation of single nanostructures, and was among the leading groups demonstrating magnetization reversal by spin-polarized currents. Furthermore, his group uses nuclear magnetic resonance , on the one hand as means of investigation of surfaces and electrodes, on the other hand, as a local probe of the electronic properties of complex ferromagnetic oxides.
