Paolo RicciPaolo Ricci earned his masters degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy) in 2000. His doctoral studies were conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with focus on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. He spent two-and-a-half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he worked on gyrokinetic simulations of the Z pinch. He joined the EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), as a EURATOM fellow in 2006, was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in June 2010, and Associate Professor in August 2016. He is at the head of the SPC theory group. Paolo Ricci is the recipient of the 2016 Section de Physique Teaching Prize and of the 2021 Craie d'Or award from the EPFL physics bachelor students.
Mohammad Amin ShokrollahiAmin Shokrollahi has worked on a variety of topics, including coding theory, computational number theory and algebra, and computational/algebraic complexity theory. He is best known for his work on iterative decoding algorithms of graph based codes, an area in which he holds a number of granted and pending patents. He is the co-inventor of Tornado codes, and the inventor of Raptor codes. His codes have been standardized and successfully deployed in practical areas dealing with data transmission over lossy networks.
Prior to joining EPFL, Amin Shokrollahi has held positions as the chief scientist of Digital Fountain, member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Insitute in Berkeley, and assistant professor at the department of computer science of the university of Bonn. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and he was awarded the Best Paper Award of the IEEE IT Society in 2002 for his work on iterative decoding of LDPC code, the IEEE Eric Sumner Award in 2007 for the development of Fountain Codes, and the joint Communication Society/Information Theory Society best paper award of 2007 for his paper on Raptor Codes.
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.
Pramod RastogiHe received his MSc degree from the University of Lucknow, MTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and doctorate degree from the University of Franche Comté in France. His research activities are principally in the area of holographic interferometry, speckle metrology, fiber optics sensors, phase shifting and moiré. He is the author or coauthor of more than 175 scientific papers of which more than 140 are published in peer-reviewed archival journals. He is also the author of book chapters, Encyclopaedia articles, and has edited several books in the field of optical metrology. His guest-edited three special sections on Optics in Switzerland for Optical Engineering in 1995 are even today an invaluable source of reference relative to optical engineering activities in Switzerland both at the academic and industrial levels. He has guest-edited over a dozen special dedicated issues in archival journals. He has also chaired and organized several international symposiums, such as, the International Conference on Applied Optical Metrology, Balatonfüred, Hungary, June 8-11, 1998; or the Conference on Trends in Optical Non-destructive Testing, Lugano, Switzerland, May 2-5, 2000, or the Conference on Advanced Phase Measurement Methods in Optics and Imaging, Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland, May 16-21, 2010 etc. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (1993) and a Fellow of the Society of the Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (1995). He is also a recipient of the Hetényi Award for the most significant research paper published in Experimental Mechanics in the year 1982.He was Elected as a Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) in 2014. He was recipient of the SPIE Dennis Gabor Award, 2014. The Dennis Gabor award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wave front technologies, especially those which further the development of holography and metrology applications. He was an honorary visiting Professor at the IIT Delhi between 1999 & 2003. Since 2000 he has also been active in laying groundwork for collaboration with the Indian Institutes of science and technology. Between the years 2000 & 2004, he was doing this as a part of his broader activity as in-charge of relations with Asia. His initiatives have led to academic exchange programs involving faculty and students with a view to fostering networking, research linkages and partnerships. To cite a few of his many initiatives: his active contribution to the holding of a high level Indo Swiss Workshop on Science & Technology at Bangalore in 2003; the setting up of ISJRP - the pilot project on bilateral partnership in S&T between Switzerland and India - in 2004; developing ISBRI (Indo-Swiss bilateral research initiative) in 2006; etc. He remained as the main coordinator of the Indo-Swiss Joint Research Program between the period covering the program's inception in 2004 until February 2011. He is currently responsible for developing academic and institutional relations with the universities in India and South-East Asian countries. He has been instrumental in helping to open up a range of opportunities to the EPFL students, such as, doing their "mobility" years at one of the IITs or, their final year major projects or internships at one of the Indian institutions/companies. Over a hundred EPFL students have benefited from these programs. He was instrumental in establishing Internship program with the aim of promoting an awareness of EPFL among the IIT students. This program has become very popular among the IIT and IIITA students with several hundreds of them having benefited from this program. He played a key role in the setting up of the EPFL-IIT Madras joint postgraduate course on "Technology and sustainable development" in 2000-01. He was the co-director of the last edition of the course which was held between January and April, 2008.
Martin VetterliMartin Vetterli was appointed president of EPFL by the Federal Council following a selection process conducted by the ETH Board, which unanimously nominated him.
Professor Vetterli was born on 4 October 1957 in Solothurn and received his elementary and secondary education in Neuchâtel Canton. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a Master’s of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Professor Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University.
Professor Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member the US National Academy of Engineering. He has published over 170 articles and three reference works.
Professor Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, Professor Vetterli is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.
Professor Vetterli knows EPFL inside and out. An EPFL graduate himself, he began been teaching at the school in 1995, was vice president for International Affairs and then Institutional Affairs from 2004 to 2011, and served as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. In addition to his role as president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a position he held from 2013 to 2016, he heads the EPFL’s Audiovisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) since 1995.
Professor Vetterli has supported more than 60 students in Switzerland and the United States in their doctoral work and makes a point of following their highly successful careers, whether it is in the academic or business world.
He is the author of some 50 patents, some of which were the basis for start-ups coming out of his lab, such as Dartfish and Illusonic, while others were sold (e.g. Qualcomm) as successful examples of technology transfer. He actively encourages young researchers to market the results of their work.
