Giorgio MargaritondoCitizen 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.
Edoardo CharbonEdoardo Charbon (SM’00 F’17) received the Elektrotechnik Diploma from ETH Zurich, the M.S. from the University of California at San Diego, and the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, 1991, and 1995, respectively, all in electrical engineering and EECS. He has consulted with numerous organizations, including Bosch, X-Fab, Texas Instruments, Maxim, Sony, Agilent, and the Carlyle Group. He was with Cadence Design Systems from 1995 to 2000, where he was the architect of the company's initiative on information hiding for intellectual property protection. In 2000, he joined Canesta Inc., as the Chief Architect, where he led the development of wireless 3-D CMOS image sensors. Since 2002 he has been a member of the faculty of EPFL, where is a full professor since 2015. From 2008 to 2016 he was full professor and chair at the Delft University of Technology, where he spearheaded the university's effort on cryogenic electronics for quantum computing as part of QuTech. He has been the driving force behind the creation of deep-submicron CMOS SPAD technology, which is mass-produced since 2015 and is present in smartphones, telemeters, proximity sensors, and medical diagnostics tools. His interests span from 3-D vision, LiDAR, FLIM, FCS, NIROT to super-resolution microscopy, time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, and cryo-CMOS circuits and systems for quantum computing. He has authored or co-authored over 400 papers and two books, and he holds 23 patents. Dr. Charbon is a distinguished visiting scholar of the W. M. Keck Institute for Space at Caltech, a fellow of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society, and a fellow of the IEEE.
César PulgarinProf. C. Pulgarin is Chemist from Lausanne University, Master in environmental chemistry from Geneva University, Ph D in synthesis bio-inspired of natural substances from Neuchâtel University. During his education he carried out several industrial trainings.
Since March 1989, he has been working at the EPFL where he is leader of the Advanced Oxidation Processes Group (GPAO) active in the development chemical, photochemical, electrochemical, ultrasonic processes, their coupling between them and with biological systems to degrade chemical and microbiological pollutants in water and air. He has an H index of 40 and he is the world most cited author in 1) TiO2 photo-assisted bacterial inactivation in water and 2) Coupling of photochemical and biological processes for pollutant degradation. He has been involved in ten African, South American and European international research projects. He has been Swiss representative in COST program 540.