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.
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.
Colin Jones is an Associate Professor in the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He was a Senior Researcher at the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zurich until 2011 and obtained a PhD in 2005 from the University of Cambridge for his work on polyhedral computational methods for constrained control. Prior to that, he was at the University of British Columbia in Canada, where he took a BASc and MASc in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics. Colin has worked in a variety of industrial roles, ranging from commercial building control to the development of custom optimization tools focusing on retail human resource scheduling. His current research interests are in the theory and computation of predictive control and optimization, and their application to green energy generation, distribution and management.
