Eric MeurvilleEric Meurville holds a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and Digital Signal Processing from the Conservatoire National des Arts & Métiers Paris, France. Since 1999, he has been working as head of the Product Design Group at the Laboratoire de Production Microtechnique of the EPFL and is responsible for advanced research projects in the field of wearable and implantable biomedical devices and in the design of innovative biosensors. During the last 9 years, he has been particularly active in bringing long-term implantable medical devices concepts to commercial realization. From 1995 to 1999 at the Institute of Microtechnology of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, his main field of research was multi-modal biometric access control systems. He was also Project Manager at the "Laboratoire d'Etude des Transmissions Ionosphériques" (LETTI), France, from 1992 to 1995 in the field of over the horizon radars. As software and hardware developer of airborne electronic warfare subsystems, he spent 6 years at Thalès (formerly Dassault Electronics), France, from 1986 to 1992.
In 2011, he co-founds gymetrics. The companys primary aim is to bring to market easy to use, non-invasive cell culture monitoring systems. This will enable improved yields and better understanding of the impact of the cell culture environment changes on cell growth.
Francesco MondadaDr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.
