Elyahou KaponEli Kapon received his Ph.D. in physics from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1982. He then spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, as a Chaim Weizmann Research Fellow, where he worked mainly on phase-locked arrays of semiconductor lasers. From 1984 till 1993 he was with Bellcore, New Jersey, first as member of technical staff, and from 1989 as District Manager. At Bellcore, he worked on integrated optics in III-V compounds and on low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, particularly quantum wires and quantum dots. He managed the Quantum Structures District and the Integrated Optoelectronics District at Bellcore from 1989 till 1992 and from 1992 till 1993, respectively. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Physics of Nanostructures at the Physics Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures. In 1999-2000 he spent his sabbatical as Sackler Scholar at the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. During that period he helped establishing the Tel Aviv University Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and served as its first Director from 2000 to 2002. In 2001 he founded the start up BeamExpress and has been serving as its Chief Scientist. He is currently serving as Director of the Institute of Quantum Electronics and Photonics in the Faculty of Basic Sciences at EPFL. His research interests include self-organization of nanostructures, optical properties and electron transport in low-dimensional quantum structures, quantum wire and quantum dot lasers, photonic crystals and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers. He is author or co-author of >300 journal articles, >10 patents, and editor of two books on semiconductor lasers.
Prof. Kapon is Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Physical Society of America, and a recipient of a 2007 Humboldt Research Award.
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.
Michel BierlaireBorn in 1967, Michel Bierlaire holds a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from the Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, Namur, Belgium (University of Namur). Between 1995 and 1998, he was research associate and project manager at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Ma, USA). Between 1998 and 2006, he was a junior faculty in the Operations Research group ROSO within the Institute of Mathematics at EPFL. In 2006, he was appointed associate professor in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL, where he became the director of the Transport and Mobility laboratory. Since 2009, he is the director of TraCE, the Transportation Center. From 2009 to 2017, he was the director of Doctoral Program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at EPFL. Since September 2017, he is the head of the Civil Engineering Institute at EPFL. His main expertise is in the design, development and applications of models and algorithms for the design, analysis and management of transportation systems. Namely, he has been active in demand modeling (discrete choice models, estimation of origin-destination matrices), operations research (scheduling, assignment, etc.) and Dynamic Traffic Management Systems. As of August 2021, he has published 136 papers in international journals, 4 books, 41 book chapters, 193 articles in conference proceedings, 182 technical reports, and has given 195 scientific seminars. His Google Scholar h-index is 68. He is the founder, organizer and lecturer of the EPFL Advanced Continuing Education Course "Discrete Choice Analysis: Predicting Demand and Market Shares". He is the founder of hEART: the European Association for Research in Transportation. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, from 2011 to 2019. He is an Associate Editor of Operations Research. He is the editor of two special issues for the journal Transportation Research Part C. He has been member of the Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) of Transportation Research Part B since 1995, of Transportation Research Part C since January 1, 2006.
Anja SkrivervikAnja Skrivervik obtained her electrical engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 1986, and her PhD from the same institution in 1992, for which she received the Latsis award. After a stay at the University of Rennes as an invited Research Fellow and two years in the industry, she returned part time to EPFL as an Assistant Professor in 1996, and is now a Professeur Titulaire at this institution, where she is the head of the Microwave and Antenna Group. Her research activities include electrically small antennas, antennas in biological media, periodic structures, reflect- and tranmitarrays, and numerical techniques for electromagnetics. She is author or co-author of more than 200 peer reviewed scientific publications. Her teaching activities include courses on microwaves and antennas, and she has course at Bachelor, Master and PhD levels. She was director of the EE section form 1996-2000, and is currently the director of the EE doctoral school at EPFL.
She is very active in European collaboration and European projects. She was the chairperson of the Swiss URSI until 2012, is a Board member of the European School on Antennas and is frequently requested to review research programs and centers in Europe. She is a member of the board of directors of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP) since 2017.
Nava SetterNava Setter completed MSc in Civil Engineering in the Technion (Israel) and PhD in Solid State Science in Penn. State University (USA) (1980). After post-doctoral work at the Universities of Oxford (UK) and Geneva (Switzerland), she joined an R&D institute in Haifa (Israel) where she became the head of the Electronic Ceramics Lab (1988). She began her affiliation with EPFL in 1989 as the Director of the Ceramics Laboratory, becoming Full Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in 1992. She had been Head of the Materials Department in the past and more recently has served as the Director of the Doctoral School for Materials.
Research at the Ceramics Laboratory, which Nava Setter directs, concerns the science and technology of functional ceramics focusing on piezoelectric and related materials: ferroelectrics, dielectrics, pyroelectrics and also ferromagnetics. The work includes fundamental and applied research and covers the various scales from the atoms to the final devices. Emphasis is given to micro- and nano-fabrication technology with ceramics and coupled theoretical and experimental studies of the functioning of ferroelectrics.
Her own research interests include ferroelectrics and piezoelectrics: in particular the effects of interfaces, finite-size and domain-wall phenomena, as well as structure-property relations and the pursuit of new applications. The leading thread in her work over the years has been the demonstration of how basic or fundamental concepts in materials - particularly ferroelectrics - can be utilized in a new way and/or in new types of devices. She has published over 450 scientific and technical papers.
Nava Setter is a Fellow of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the World Academy of Ceramics. Among the awards she received are the Swiss-Korea Research Award, the ISIF outstanding achievement award, and the Ferroelectrics-IEEE recognition award. In 2010 her research was recognized by the European Union by the award of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant. Recently she received the IEEE-UFFC Achievement Award (2011),the W.R. Buessem Award(2011), the Robert S. Sosman Award Lecture (American Ceramics Society) (2013), and the American Vacuum Society Recognition for Excellence in Leadership (2013).
Claudio BruschiniClaudio Bruschini holds an MSc in high energy physics from the University of Genova and a PhD in Applied Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He started his career with INFN (Italy, 1993), in the WA92 CERN collaboration (particle physics), and then moved to CERN as a Fellow in the European GP-MIMD2 project, attached to the NA48 collaboration (particle physics, parallel programming, 1994-1995). He then started his close collaboration with EPFL, first in the DeTeC (Demining Technology Center) project (sensors for landmine detection/humanitarian demining, 1996-1997). After DeTeC's end, he started the first of a series of fruitful collaborations with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on humanitarian demining related R&D (1998). This was followed by the EUDEM survey project (The European Union in Humanitarian Demining, 1998), the EUDEM2 three year EC sponsored support measure (www.eudem.info, 2001-2004), and the DELVE support action (www.delve.vub.ac.be, 2007). In parallel he started working within the EPFL's AQUA group (Advanced Quantum Architectures, Edoardo Charbon), on topics as diverse as ultrasonic sensors for in-air application, optical 3D and high speed 2D sensing, sensor networks, or tracking/motion capture systems, in particular for the preparation of research projects. This culminated in the European MEGAFRAME (www.megaframe.eu, FP6, 2006-2010, SPAD arrays and related in-pixel time stamping electronics in deep submicron CMOS technology) and SPADnet (www.spadnet.eu, FP7, 2010-2014, networked SPAD arrays for Positron Emission Tomography) projects, coordinated by EPFL-AQUA. As from 2009 he also worked with Dario Floreano on the management of the CURVACE Curved Artificial Compound Eyes FP7 project (www.curvace.org), coordinated by EPFL-LIS. He was also active with CHUV (Lausanne University Hospital) within EndoTOFPET-US (endoscopic PET) as well as on a CTI project devoted to the development of a new hand-held standalone tool for tracer-guided medical procedures. In 2014 he had also the pleasure of joining the EPFL ICLAB of Christian Enz during its ramp-up phase, collaborating on device related topics (SNF GigaRadMOST) and biomedical R&D (NanoTera WiseSkin). Claudio is now fully with EPFL’s Advanced Quantum Architecture (AQUA). He has also been active as independent scientific consultant, under the label CBR Scientific Consulting, on the preparation of (European) R&D project proposals and the execution of individual studies, and worked in 2006 for a local start-up as operations manager and R&D advisor.... but this is another story. An unauthorized early biography is available at http://lami.epfl.ch/team/claudiob/... 