John Richard ThomeJohn R. Thome is Professor of Heat and Mass Transfer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland since 1998, where his primary interests of research are two-phase flow and heat transfer, covering both macro-scale and micro-scale heat transfer and enhanced heat transfer. He directs the Laboratory of Heat and Mass Transfer (LTCM) at the EPFL with a research staff of about 18-20 and is also Director of the Doctoral School in Energy. He received his Ph.D. at Oxford University, England in 1978. He is the author of four books: Enhanced Boiling Heat Transfer (1990), Convective Boiling and Condensation, 3rd Edition (1994), Wolverine Engineering Databook III (2004) and Nucleate Boiling on Micro-Structured Surfaces (2008). He received the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Best Paper Award in 1998 for a 3-part paper on two-phase flow and flow boiling heat transfer published in the Journal of Heat Transfer. He has received the J&E Hall Gold Medal from the U.K. Institute of Refrigeration in February, 2008 for his extensive research contributions on refrigeration heat transfer and more recently the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award. He has published widely on the fundamental aspects of microscale and macroscale two-phase flow and heat transfer and on enhanced boiling and condensation heat transfer.
Jan Sickmann HesthavenProf. Hesthaven received an M.Sc. in computational physics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in August 1991. During the studies, the last 6 months of 1989 was spend at JET, the european fusion laboratory in Culham, UK. Following graduation, he was awarded a 3 year fellowship to begin work towards a Ph.D. at Riso National Laboratory in the Department of Optics and Fluid Dynamics. During the 3 years of study, the academic year of 1993-1994 was spend in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and three 3 months during the summer of 1994 in Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of New Mexico. In August 1995, he recieved a Ph.D. in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematical Modelling (DTU). Following graduation in August 1995, he was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Advanced Scientific Computing and was approinted Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. In December of 1996, he was appointed consultant to the Institute of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering(ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC). As of July 1999, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics, in September 2000 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, as of July 2001 he was awarded a Manning Assistant Professorship, and in March 2002, he was awarded an NSF Career Award. In January 2003, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics with tenure and in May 2004 he was awarded Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences (the highest award given for teaching excellence in all sciences at Brown University). He was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics as of July 2005. From October 2006 to June 2013, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) at Brown University. As of October 2007, he holds the (honorary) title of Professor (Adjunct) at the Technical University of Denmark. In November 2009, he successfully defended his dr.techn thesis at the Technical University of Denmark and was rewarded the degree of Doctor Technices -- the highest academic distinction awarded based on ... substantial and lasting contributions that has helped to move the research area forward and penetrated into applications. As grant Co-PI he served from Aug 2010 to June 2013 as Deputy Director of the Institute of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), the newest NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. After having spend his entire academic career at Brown University, Prof Hesthaven decided to pursue new challenges and joined the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in July 2013. In March 2014 he was elected SIAM Fellow for contributions to high-order methods for partial differential equations.
Vincenzo SavonaVincenzo Savona studied physics in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, prior to completing his PhD at the EPFL's Institute of Theoretical Physics. Subsequently he did post-doctoral work, first at the EPFL and then in the physics department of the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2002, he returned to the EPFL to create his own research group, receiving a "professeur boursier" fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2006, he was appointed tenure-track assistant professor at the EPFL and joined the NCCR for Quantum Photonics. In 2010 he was appointed associate professor. Currently he directs the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics of Nanosystems.
Peter RyserDr. Peter Ryser is a Professor Emeritus at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He has over three decades of research and teaching experience from various corporate and academic institutions. He was previously a Director at Siemens Building Technologies where he was responsible for R&D, product innovation and patents. Dr. Ryser has a Ph.D. in applied Physics from the University of Geneva, a Masters degree in Experimental Physics and an MBA.
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.
