Nava SetterNava Setter completed MSc in Civil Engineering in the Technion (Israel) and PhD in Solid State Science in Penn. State University (USA) (1980). After post-doctoral work at the Universities of Oxford (UK) and Geneva (Switzerland), she joined an R&D institute in Haifa (Israel) where she became the head of the Electronic Ceramics Lab (1988). She began her affiliation with EPFL in 1989 as the Director of the Ceramics Laboratory, becoming Full Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. She had been Head of the Materials Department in the past and more recently has served as the Director of the Doctoral School for Materials.
Research at the Ceramics Laboratory, which Nava Setter directs, concerns the science and technology of functional ceramics focusing on piezoelectric and related materials: ferroelectrics, dielectrics, pyroelectrics and also ferromagnetics. The work includes fundamental and applied research and covers the various scales from the atoms to the final devices. Emphasis is given to micro- and nano-fabrication technology with ceramics and coupled theoretical and experimental studies of the functioning of ferroelectrics.
Her own research interests include ferroelectrics and piezoelectrics: in particular the effects of interfaces, finite-size and domain-wall phenomena, as well as structure-property relations and the pursuit of new applications. The leading thread in her work over the years has been the demonstration of how basic or fundamental concepts in materials - particularly ferroelectrics - can be utilized in a new way and/or in new types of devices. She has published over 450 scientific and technical papers.
Nava Setter is a Fellow of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the World Academy of Ceramics. Among the awards she received are the Swiss-Korea Research Award, the ISIF outstanding achievement award, and the Ferroelectrics-IEEE recognition award. In 2010 her research was recognized by the European Union by the award of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. Recently she received the IEEE-UFFC Achievement Award (2011),the W.R. Buessem Award(2011), the Robert S. Sosman Award Lecture (American Ceramics Society) (2013), and the American Vacuum Society Recognition for Excellence in Leadership (2013).
Jamie PaikProf. Jamie Paik is founder and director of the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL) of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and a core member of Swiss NCCR robotics group. The RRL leverages expertise in multi-material fabrication and smart material actuation for novel robot designs. She received her PhD in Seoul National University on designing humanoid arm and a hand while being sponsored by Samsung Electronics. This 7-DoF humanoid arm was the lightest in the literature at that time being 3.7kg including the 8-DoF hand. During her Postdoctoral positions in the Institut des Systems Intelligents et de Robotic in Universitat Pierre Marie Curie, Paris VI, she developed laparoscopic tools named JAiMY that are internationally patented and commercialized now by Endocontrol-medical.com. At Harvard University’s Microrobotics Laboratory, she started developing unconventional robots that push the physical limits of material and mechanisms. Her latest research effort is in soft robotics including self-morphing Robogami (robotic origami) that transforms its planar shape to 2D or 3D by folding in predefined patterns and sequences, just like the paper art, origami.
Luis Guillermo Villanueva TorrijoGuillermo Villanueva is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausane (EPFL), Switzerland, in the Mechanical Engineering Institute (IGM). Before joining EPFL he was a Marie Curie post-doctoral scholar at DTU (Denmark) and Caltech (California, US); and before a post-doc at EPFL-LMIS1. He received his M.Sc. in Physics in Zaragoza (Spain) and his PhD from the UAB in Barcelona (Spain).
Since the start of his PhD (2002), Prof. Villanueva has been active in the fields of NEMS/MEMS for sensing, having expertise from the design and fabrication to the characterization and applicability. He has co-authored more than 75 papers in peer-reviewed journals (h-index of 24 WoK, 32 GoS) and more than 100 contributions to international conferences.
He is serving, or has served, on the program committees of IEEE-NEMS, IEEE-Sensors, MNE, IEEE-FCS and Transducers. He is editor of Microelectronic Engineering. He has co-organized MNE2014 and SNC2015; and he is currently co-organizing the short courses at Transducers 2019 and the 16th International Workshop on Nanomechanical Sensors (NMC2019).
Philippe RenaudPhilippe Renaud is Professor at the Microsystem Laboratory (LMIS4) at EPFL. He is also the scientific director of the EPFL Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMI). His main research area is related to micronano technologies in biomedical applications (BioMEMS) with emphasis on cell-chips, nanofluidics and bioelectronics. Ph. Renaud is invloved in many scientifics papers in his research area. He received his diploma in physics from the University of Neuchâtel (1983) and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Lausanne (1988). He was postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley (1988-89) and then at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory in Switzerland (1990-91). In 1992, he joined the Sensors and Actuators group of the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) at Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was appointed assistant professor at EPFL in 1994 and full professor in 1997. In summer 1996, he was visiting professor at the Tohoku University, Japan. Ph. Renaud is active in several scientific committee (scientific journals, international conferences, scientific advisory boards of companies, PhD thesis committee). He is also co-founder of the Nanotech-Montreux conference. Ph. Renaud is committed to valorization of basic research through his involvement in several high-tech start-up companies.
