César PulgarinProf. C. Pulgarin is Chemist from Lausanne University, Master in environmental chemistry from Geneva University, Ph D in synthesis bio-inspired of natural substances from Neuchâtel University. During his education he carried out several industrial trainings.
Since March 1989, he has been working at the EPFL where he is leader of the Advanced Oxidation Processes Group (GPAO) active in the development chemical, photochemical, electrochemical, ultrasonic processes, their coupling between them and with biological systems to degrade chemical and microbiological pollutants in water and air. He has an H index of 40 and he is the world most cited author in 1) TiO2 photo-assisted bacterial inactivation in water and 2) Coupling of photochemical and biological processes for pollutant degradation. He has been involved in ten African, South American and European international research projects. He has been Swiss representative in COST program 540.
Lukas KühnLukas Kühn graduated in biochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He received his PhD in 1979 for a thesis with Jean-Pierre Kraehenbuhl at the University of Lausanne. After postdoctoral work in Lausanne and with Frank Ruddle at Yale University, USA, he became group leader at ISREC in 1984, was promoted senior scientist in 1988 and EPFL Adjunct Professor (professeur titulaire) in June 2008.
Roland LogéRoland Logé is an associate professor at EPFL, with a primary affiliation to the Materials Institute, and a secondary affiliation to the Microengineering Institute.
After graduating in 1994 at UCL (Belgium) in Materials Engineering, he earned a Master of Science in Mechanics in 1995, at UCSB Santa Barbara (USA). He received his PhD at Mines Paristech-CEMEF (France) in 1999, where he specialized in metal forming and associated microstructure evolutions. After a postdoc at Cornell University (USA) between 1999 and 2001, he entered CNRS in France.
In 2008, he was awarded the ALCAN prize from the French Academy of Sciences, together with Yvan Chastel.
In 2009 he became head of the Metallurgy-Structure-Rheology research group at CEMEF.
In 2011, he launched a “Groupement de Recherche” (GDR), funded by CNRS, networking most of the researchers in France involved in recrystallization and grain growth.
In 2013, he became Research Director at CNRS.
In March 2014 he joined EPFL as the head of the Laboratory of Thermomechanical Metallurgy.
Philippe GilletPhilippe GILLET completed his undergraduate studies in Earth Science at Ecole normale supérieure de la rue dUlm (Paris). In 1983 he obtained a PhD in Geophysics at Université de Paris VII and joined Université de Rennes I as an assistant. Having obtained a State Doctorate in 1988, he became a Professor at this same university, which he left in 1992 to join Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon.
The first part of his research career was devoted to the formation of mountain ranges particularly of the Alps. In parallel, he developed experimental techniques (diamond anvil cells) to recreate the pressure and temperature prevailing deep inside planets in the lab. These experiments aim at understanding what materials make up the unreachable depths of planets in the solar system.
In 1997, Gillet started investigating extraterrestrial matter. He was involved in describing meteorites coming from Mars, the moon or planets which have disappeared today and explaining how these were expelled from their original plant by enormous shocks which propelled them to Earth. He also participated in the NASA Stardust program and contributed to identify comet grains collected from the tail of Comet Wild 2 and brought back to Earth. These grains represent the initial minerals in our solar system and were formed over 4.5 billion years ago. He has also worked on the following subjects:
Interactions between bacteria and minerals.
Solid to glass transition under pressure.
Experimental techniques: laser-heated diamond anvil cell, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction with synchrotron facilities, electron microscopy.
Philippe Gillet is also active in science and education management. He was the Director of the CNRS Institut National des Sciences de lUnivers (France), the President of the French synchrotron facility SOLEIL and of the French National Research Agency (2007), and the Director of Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon. Before joining EPFL he was the Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research.
Selected publications:
Ferroir, T., L. Dubrovinsky, A. El Goresy, A. Simionovici, T. Nakamura, and P. Gillet (2010), Carbon polymorphism in shocked meteorites: Evidence for new natural ultrahard phases, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 290(1-2), 150-154.
Barrat J.A., Bohn M., Gillet Ph., Yamaguchi A. (2009) Evidence for K-rich terranes on Vesta from impact spherules. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 44, 359374.
Brownlee D, Tsou P, Aleon J, et al. (2006) Comet 81P/Wild 2 under a microscope. Science, 314, 1711-1716.
Beck P., Gillet Ph., El Goresy A., and Mostefaoui S. (2005) Timescales of shock processes in chondrites and Martian meteorites. Nature 435, 1071-1074.
Blase X., Gillet Ph., San Miguel A. and Mélinon P. (2004) Exceptional ideal strength of carbon clathrates. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 215505-215509.
Gillet Ph. (2002) Application of vibrational spectroscopy to geology. In Handbook of vibrational spectroscopy, Vol. 4 (ed. J. M. Chalmers and P. R. Griffiths), pp. 1-23. John Wiley & Sons.
Gillet Ph., Chen C., Dubrovinsky L., and El Goresy A. (2000) Natural NaAlSi3O8 -hollandite in the shocked Sixiangkou meteorite. Science 287, 1633-1636.
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.
Cyril Cayron1992-1995 Engineering School. Ecole des Mines de Nancy.
1994-1995 Master's degree in Materials Science (rank = 1st)
1995-1996 Military Service
1996-2000 PhD at EPFL-CIME. Precipitation in 6xxx alloys and composites.
2000-2014 Researcher, Engineer and Group leader on materials for new energies at CEA-Grenoble, France.
2012 Habilitation to supervise researches (HDR)
2014-now Senior Scientist at EPFL-LMTM
Creator of the computer programs GenOVa and ARPGE (in Python).
I currently work on crystallographic models of martensitic transformations and deformation twinning.
Xile HuXile Hu was born in 1978 in Putian, southeastern China. He entered the Peking University in Beijing in 1996. Besides learning too little chemistry, his biggest regret in the college was not able to correct his southern accent in Mandarin. After graduated from PKU, he went to the United States and began his doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego. In December 2004, he finished with a Ph.D. in chemistry and some fond memories of the beautiful city of San Diego. He then moved to the Los Angeles area and become a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. There he enjoyed numerous stimulating scientific (and other) discussions with friends and colleagues. He also made plenty of friends outside the campus and was a frequent in many local Chinese restaurants. In 2007, after two pleasant visits to Switzerland, he decided to move across the continent one more time and join the faculty of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He now directs the Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis and Catalysis and is interested in developing chemistry for synthesis, energy and sustainability.
Wilfried KurzWilfried Kurz is Professor Emeritus of Materials Science at "Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL" (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). He received his diploma and doctors degree from University of Leoben, Austria. In 1964 he joined the staff of the Battelle Geneva Research Laboratories, which he left in 1971 as head of the physical metallurgy group. In the same year he was appointed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where, until his retirement in 2003, he directed the Laboratory of Physical Metallurgy as well as of the Laser Materials Processing Centre. After participating in 1972/73 in the foundation of the curriculum in Materials Science and Engineering at EPFL he was twice Head of Department. Under others he served as president of SVMT (Swiss Assoc. for Materials Science & Technology) and of FEMS, the Federation of European Materials Societies. Author of four books, he published some 250 papers and patents, principally on the science and technology of solidification microstructures and processes. Professor Kurz is corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, highly cited researcher and the recipient of awards from Eisenhuette Oesterreich; The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS, USA); ASM International, USA; Société Française de Métallurgie et de Matériaux; Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Materialkunde; Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, London; Associatione Italiana di Metallurgia; Peoples Republic of China; Federation of European Materials Societies; and Iron and Steel Institute of Japan.
Selected publications of recent years:
Fundamentals of Solidification, W. Kurz, DJ Fisher, Trans Tech Publ., Switzerland,, 4th revised edition 1998, 305 p
Solidification, H Müller-Krumbhaar, W Kurz, E Brener, in: Phase Transformations in Materials, G Kostorz, ed., Wiley-VCH, 2001, p.81-170
Single-crystal laser deposition of superalloys: Processing-microstructure maps, M Gäumann, C Bezencon, P Canalis, W Kurz, Acta Mater., 49 (2001) 1051-1062
Solidification microstructure processing maps: Theory and application, W Kurz, Adv. Eng. Mater., 3 (2001) 443-452
Dendritic growth, W Kurz, R Trivedi, in: Proc. MC Flemings Symposium on Solidification and Materials Processing, eds R Abbaschian, H Brody, A Mortensen, TMS, Warrendale, PA, 2001, p. 87-99
Massive Transformation and Absolute Stability, M. Lima, W. Kurz, Metall. Mater. Trans. 33A (2002) 2337-2345
Introduction to Materials Science, JP Mercier, G Zambelli, W Kurz, Elsevier, Paris, 2002, 461 p.
Epitaxial deposition of MCrAlY coatings on a Ni-base superalloy by laser cladding, C Bezencon, A Schnell, W Kurz, Scripta Mater. 49 (2003) 705-709
Peritectic Coupled Growth, S Dobler, TS Lo, M Plapp, A Karma, W Kurz, Acta Mater., 52 (2004) 2795-2808
Solidification cracking of superalloy single- and bi-crystals, N Wang, S Mokadem, M Rappaz, W Kurz, Acta Mater., 52 (2004) 3173-3182
Laser Repair of Superalloy Single Crystals with Varying Substrate Orientations, S Mokadem, C Bezencon, A Hauert, A Jacot, W Kurz, Metall. Mater. Trans. 38A (2007) 1500-1510
Plane Front Solidification, W. Kurz, ASM Handbook Vol. 15: Casting, 2008, 293-298
Solidification microstructures and solid-state parallels: Recent developments, future directions, M Asta, C Beckermann, A Karma, W Kurz, R Napolitano , M Plapp, G Purdy, M Rappaz, R Trivedi, Acta Mater., 57 (2009) 941971
Solute Trapping-Free Massive Transformation at Absolute Stability, A. Jacot, M. Sumida, W. Kurz, Acta Mater. 59 (2011) 1716-1724
