Nihat KotlukDr. Kotluk is currently a post-doc at the EPFL. He focuses mainly on emotions in the decision-making process, moral reasoning, and ethics in Engineering Education. He also works on equality and diversity issues. He has an academic background in both STEM and social sciences.
Dr. Kotluk has acquired advanced skills in education, inclusive pedagogy, and science teachers' training. He has 14 years of teaching experience and has trained high school students in physics and teachers in pedagogy and research methods, among others. Dr. Kotluk has strong teaching and learning communication skills. He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Science, Curriculum, and Instruction. In his thesis, he studied the perceptions and practices of educators in culturally relevant pedagogy and developed recommendations to put more emphasis on inclusion in pre-service teacher education. With his research, he opened a new discussion in the academic community in Turkey and internationally.
In his recent work, he analyzes the educational challenges facing refugee communities and other marginalized groups. In the study, he focused on whether and how teachers implemented the principles of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies and the challenges teachers faced while trying to implement these principles with Syrian students in Turkey.
In his more recent work, he has studied moral emotions, moral reasoning in engineering ethics, and equality and diversity issues in engineering education.
His teaching and research interests include emotions in engineering education, culturally responsive STEM education, equity and diversity in education, and multicultural education.
Alain WegmannAlain Wegmann joined EPFL in 1996. His interests are in techniques to better align business and IT. He developed, with his group and partners, the SEAM methods: SEAM for business (strategic thinking), SEAM for enterprise architecture (business/IT alignment) and SEAM for software (IT). The originality of SEAM is in the integration of generic systems thinking principles into discipline-specific methods. This integration has three benefits: (1) the possibility to relate the different disciplines (by having common systemic principles); (2) the capability to leverage on discipline-specific knowledge (by using the vocabulary and the heuristics of each discipline) and (3) to be more efficient in solving problems (by benefiting from the problem solving techniques developed in systems thinking). SEAM is currently applied in master courses and consulting. Consulting is done for start-ups developing their business and technology strategies and for large companies having service-oriented architecture projects.
Prior to joining EPFL, Alain Wegmann worked for 14 years with Logitech in software development/engineering management (Switzerland, Taiwan, US), manufacturing (Taiwan) and marketing (US). When he left Logitech, Alain Wegmann was engineering vice-president and marketing director for large accounts.
