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Related people (31)
Pascale Jablonka
Pascale Jablonka is a French/Swiss astrophysicist who specializes in the area of galaxy evolution. She earned a doctorate in astrophysics from the University Paris 7- Denis Diderot in France. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Headquarter of the European Southern Observatory (ESO, Germany), before obtaining a position at CNRS (France). She is currently Directrice de Recherche at CNRS and on leave of absence from Paris Observatory in the Laboratoire d'astrophysique of EPFL. Pascale Jablonka conducts both observations and numerical simulations to gain insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies. Her research focuses on three main topics : > Understanding the nature of the first stars in the Universe > Infering the driving parameters of the galaxy star formation histories > Deciphering the impact of the environment on galaxy evolution. Her research exploits ground-based and space telescopes as well as high performance computing facilities.
Georges Meylan
After his PhD thesis in astrophysics in 1985 at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva, Georges Meylan spent some years as a postdoc at the University of California in Berkeley, USA, and at the Headquarters of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich, Germany. He then hold senior astronomer positions at ESO in Munich and at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA. Since 2004, he holds the chair of astrophysics at EPFL.
His research interests are related to observational cosmology, including the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, quasars and their host galaxies, the formation and evolution of galaxies from the early Universe to the present time, stellar dynamics and stellar populations from the nearby to the most distant galaxies.
Frédéric Courbin
After his studies in fundamental physics at the University of Paris-XI (Orsay, France), Frédéric Courbin carried out his PhD work between the Astrophysics Institute of the University of Liège (Belgium), Paris Observatory (France), and the European Southern Observatory (Germany). In 1999, he left Europe for three years, taking advantage of the clear skies of Chile to carry out his research using the brand new Very Large Telescope, constructed by Europe in the Atacama desert. In 2004, after two years of a Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Liège, he joint the Laboratory of Astrophysics, where he is now Professor. His main fields of activity are in observational cosmology and extragalactic astrophysics as well as in image and signal processing. In 2018, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in connection with his work in cosmology with gravitational lenses. At EPFL, he is a member of the committee for the Physics Doctoral School since 2013 and has been the tutor of more than 30 PhD students. He is a member of the EPFL Council for the Faculty of Basic Sciences since 2018 and a member of the School Assembly since 2020.
Giorgio Margaritondo
Citizen of the USA and Switzerland, Giorgio Margaritondo was born in Rome, Italy, in 1946. He received the Laurea summa cum laude from the University of Rome in 1969. From 1969 he was an employee of the Italian National Research Council in Rome and Frascati and, in 1975-77, he was at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1978 to 1990, he was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA; in 1984 he was nominated associate director for research of the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the same university. In 1990 he was nominated "professeur ordinaire" (full professor) at the EPFL; he directed the Institute of Applied Physics and the Physics Department. He was also a honorary faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2001 he became Dean of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. In 2004 he was nominated Provost and he served until 2010, when he became Dean of Continuing Education, until his retirement from the EPFL in 2016 In addition to teaching general physics, his activity concerns the physics of semiconductors and superconductors (electronic states, surfaces and interfaces) and of biological systems; his main experimental techniques are electron spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, x-ray imaging and scanning near-field microscopy, including experiments with synchrotron light and with free electron lasers. Author of more than 700 scientific publications and 9 books, he was also coordinator in 1995-98 of the scientific division of the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste. In 1997-2003 he was coordinator of the European Commission Round Table on synchrotron radiation, and then became president of the Council of the European Commission Integrated Initiative on Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Science (IA-SFS and then ELISA), the largest network in the world in this domain. In 2011-15, he was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). He is currently vice-president of the council of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), and president of the Scientific and Technological Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Vacuum Society and Fellow and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics.
Martin Vetterli
Martin 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.