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.
Jacques LévyJacques Lévy (1952-) is a geographer and an urbanist, full professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). He is the director of Chôros Laboratory and the director of the Architecture and Sciences of the City doctoral programme.
Topics
His major concerns are social theory of space, urbanity, globalisation, cartography, and the epistemology of social sciences. He has completed numerous research projects, including theoretical reflections, field studies on metropolises worldwide, and practical urban and territorial projects. He is working on the introduction of non-verbal, namely audio-visual languages, in all dimensions of academic research. He has been the director of a scientific film, Urbanity/ies (2013)
Positions and Activities
Formerly, he has been researcher at the French CNRS, then professor at the Paris Institut détudes politique (Sciences Po, F) and at Rheims University (F). He has been invited professor in various universities: UCLA, NYU, USP (São Paulo), LOrientale (Naples), Macquarie (Sydney), and the Reclus Chair in Mexico City. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2003-2004). He has been invited as a keynote speaker in many congresses and conferences throughout the World.
He is the co-editor of EspacesTemps.net, a bilingual free-access journal of social sciences. He is the co-director of Lespace en société book series at PPUR/EPFL Press publisher. He is the scientific adviser of Pouvoirs Locaux journal. He is member of the international Grand Prix de lUrbanisme (Paris). He has numerous collaborations with newspapers and radio channels in France and Switzerland.
Publications
He has published in French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Hungarian. Among his 600 publications, the following ones can be particularly noted: Révolutions, fin et suite (with Patrick Garcia & Marie-Flore Mattei, EspacesTemps/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991);
Géographies du politique (ed., Presses de Sciences Po/EspacesTemps, 1991); Le monde : espaces et systèmes (with Marie-Françoise Durand & Denis Retaillé, Presses de Sciences Po/Dalloz, 1992 ; 2nd edition 1993), Lespace légitime (Presses de la FNSP, 1994); Egogéographies (LHarmattan, 1995); Le monde pour Cité (Hachette, 1996); Nouvelles géographies (Le Débat journal, special issue Nov. 1996); Europe : une géographie (Hachette, 1997 ; new edition 2011); Mondialisation : les mots et les choses (with the Mondialisation group, Karthala, 1999); Le tournant géographique (Belin, 1999); Logiques de lespace, esprit des lieux (Belin, 2000, co-ed. Michel Lussault); Repenser le territoire : un dictionnaire critique (LAube, 2000, with Serge Wachter et al.); From Geopolitics to Global Politics (ed., Frank Cass, Londres, 2001); Dictionnaire de la géographie et de lespace des sociétés (Belin, 2003, co-ed. with Michel Lussault); La carte, enjeu contemporain (La Documentation Photographique, 2004, with Patrick Poncet & Emmanuelle Tricoire); Les sens du mouvement (Belin, 2005, co-ed. with Sylvain Allemand & François Ascher); Eine geographische Wende » (Geographische Zeitschrift journal, special issue, 2005); Penser lespace pour lire la vieillesse (PUF, 2006, with Pierre Brunel, Claudine Attias-Donfut, & Jean Morval); Milton Santos, philosophe du mondial, citoyen du local (PPUR, 2007);
Linvention du Monde (ed., Presses de Sciences Po, 2008); The City (Ashgate, 2008); Échelles de lhabiter (ed., PUCA, 2008); Our Inhabited Space (ed., FNRS, 2009); Le sfide cartografiche (co-ed with Emanuela Casti, Il Lavoro Editoriale, 2010); Globalization of Urbanity (dir., avec Josep Acebillo et Chrisitan Schmid, iCUP, 2013); Réinventer la France (Fayard, 2013); Mondialisation : consommateur ou acteur ? (avec Jacques Cossart et Lucas Léger, Le Muscadier, 2013).
Marilyne AndersenMarilyne Andersen is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and heads the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) that she launched in the Fall of 2010. She was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL from 2013 to 2018 and is the Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg. She also co-leads the Student Kreativity and Innovation Laboratory (SKIL) at ENAC. Before joining EPFL as a faculty, she was an Assistant Professor then Associate Professor tenure-track in the Building Technology Group of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and the Head of the MIT Daylighting Lab that she founded in 2004. She has also been Invited Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2019. Marilyne Andersen owns a Master of Science in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD in Building Physics at EPFL in the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) and as a Visiting Scholar in the Building Technologies Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Her research lies at the interface between science, engineering and architectural design with a dedicated emphasis on the impact of daylight on building occupants. Focused on questions of comfort, perception and health and their implications on energy considerations, these research efforts aim towards a deeper integration of the design process with daylighting performance and indoor comfort, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. She is leveraging this research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a startup company she co-founded, which offers specialized consulting services on daylight performance and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants. She is the author of more than 200 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences and the recipient of several grants and awards including: the Daylight Award for Research (2016), eleven publication awards and distinctions (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019) including the Taylor Technical Talent Award 2009 granted by the Illuminating Engineering Society, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant (2009), the Mitsui Career Development Professorship at MIT (2008) and the EPFL prize of the Chorafas Foundation awarded to her PhD thesis in Sustainability (2005). Her research or teaching has been supported by professional, institutional and industrial organizations such as: the Swiss and the U.S. National Science Foundations, the Velux Foundation, the European Horizon 2020 program, the Boston Society of Architects, the MIT Energy Initiative and InnoSuisse. She was the leader and faculty advisor of the Swiss Team and its NeighborHub project, who won the U.S. Solar Decathlon 2017 competition with 8 podiums out of 10 contests. She is a member of the Board of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and Head of its Academic Committee. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Building and Environment by Elsevier, and of the journals LEUKOS (of the Illuminating Engineering Society) and Buildings and Cities, by Taylor and Francis. She is expert to the Innovation Council of InnoSuisse and Founding member as well as Board member of the Foundation Culture du Bâti (CUB), and is also founding member of the Daylight Academy and an active member of several committees of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and International Commission on Illumination (CIE).
