Jean-Claude BünzliJean-Claude Bünzli was born in 1944. He earned a degree in chemical engineering in 1968 and a PhD in 1971 (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne) for his work on the kinetic behaviour of Nb and Ta pentachloride adducts. He spent two years at the University of British Columbia as a teaching postdoctoral fellow (photoelectron spectroscopy) and one year at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (physical organic chemistry).
Positions
He was appointed assistant-professor at the University of Lausanne in 1974 and started a research program on the spectrochemical properties of f-elements. He was promoted as a full professor of inorganic and analytical chemistry in 1980. He transferred to EPFL in 2001 where he directed the Laboratory of Lanthanide Supramolecular Chemistry until 2010.
From 2009 to 2013, he was World Class University Professor at Korea University (South Korea) helping developing a new research center for photovoltaics. In 20154-2015 he acted as visiting professor at FJIRSM (Fuzhou, Fujian), a laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He presently holds the Dr Kennedy Wong Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Hong Kong Baptist University (3 months/year) and a position as Distinguished Scholar at University of Technology, Sydney (NSW, Australia, 1 month/year).
Administrative and reviewer duties
He acted as the elected Dean of the Faculty of Sciences (1990-1991) and as one of the elected Vice-Rectors of the University (1991-1995), in charge of students' affairs and of research programs in the field of biomedical sciences. He held a position of invited professor at the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg in 1996 and at the Science University of Tokyo in 1998. In 1989, he founded the European Rare Earths and Actinide Society which coordinate international conferences in the field (cf. http://ereswww.epfl.ch).
He served as a World Bank Project Specialist within the framework of the Chinese Provincial Universities Development Project (Northwest China, 1989) and as a member of a Panel in charge of evaluating chemical research at Norwegian universities (1997). In 2001, he was hired as "Peer leader" for the evaluation of the Swiss universities of applied sciences. In 2005, he acted as a member of the "Physical Inorganic Panel" of the Science Foundation of Ireland and in 2006 he was nominated to the "Chemistry Panel" of the same foundation.
He is a member of the Editorial Board of Spectroscopy Letters, associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of Rare Earths, and senior editor of the Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths (54 volumes published to date).
Teaching
Regarding teaching, he has directed the joint project of the universities of Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg "General chemistry for students enrolled in a life sciences curriculum", within the frame of the "Swiss virtual campus", a program sponsored by the Conference of Swiss universities and the Swiss federal office for science and education (2000-2004). Web site: http://chimge@epfl.ch
Research
His research is centered on lanthanide luminescent molecular and supramolecular edifices, with main applications in biology & medicine. He is the author or the co-author of 350 research papers, 260 contributed communications and has presented 285 invited conferences, seminars, and courses. He has collected >22800 citations (h-index 72). Olivier MartinOlivier J.F. Martin received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1989 and 1994, respectively, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. In 1989, he joined IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, where he investigated thermal and optical properties of semiconductor laser diodes. Between 1994 and 1997 he was a research staff member at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). In 1997 he received a Lecturer fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). During the period 1996-1999, he spent a year and a half in the U.S.A., as invited scientist at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD). In 2001 he received a Professorship grant from the SNSF and became Professor of Nano-Optics at the ETHZ. In 2003, he was appointed Professor of Nanophotonics and Optical Signal Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), where he is currently head of the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory and Director of the Microengineering Section.
Pascale JablonkaPascale Jablonka is a French/Swiss astrophysicist who specializes in the area of galaxy evolution. She earned a doctorate in astrophysics from the University Paris 7- Denis Diderot in France. She then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Headquarter of the European Southern Observatory (ESO, Germany), before obtaining a position at CNRS (France). She is currently Directrice de Recherche at CNRS and on leave of absence from Paris Observatory in the Laboratoire d'astrophysique of EPFL. Pascale Jablonka conducts both observations and numerical simulations to gain insights into the formation and evolution of galaxies. Her research focuses on three main topics : > Understanding the nature of the first stars in the Universe > Infering the driving parameters of the galaxy star formation histories > Deciphering the impact of the environment on galaxy evolution. Her research exploits ground-based and space telescopes as well as high performance computing facilities.
Mihai Adrian IonescuAdrian M. Ionescu is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received the B.S./M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 1989 and 1997, respectively. He has held staff and/or visiting positions at LETI-CEA, Grenoble, France and INP Grenoble, France and Stanford University, USA, in 1998 and 1999. Dr. Ionescu has published more than 600 articles in international journals and conferences. He received many Best Paper Awards in international conferences, the Annual Award of the Technical Section of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1994 and the Blondel Medal in 2009 for contributions to the progress in engineering sciences in the domain of electronics. He is the 2013 recipient of the IBM Faculty Award in Engineering. He served the IEDM and VLSI conference technical committees and was the Technical Program Committee (Co)Chair of ESSDERC in 2006 and 2013. He is a member of the SATW. He is director of the Laboratory of Micro/Nanoelectronic Devices (NANOLAB).
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).
Duncan Thomas Lindsay AlexanderDuncan Alexander graduated with a PhD in Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge in 2003 for a thesis on the kinetics of metallurgical phase transformations under the direction of Lindsay Greer. From 2003 to 2007 he held a Royal Society Overseas Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney, and then post-doctoral positions at the University of Cambridge and Arizona State University, working first on materials electrochemistry with Carsten Schwandt and Derek Fray, and then the characterization of atmospheric aerosol particles with Peter Crozier and Jim Anderson. In 2007 he came to EPFL as a scientific collaborator in the group of László Forró, and from 2008 to 2017 he was a staff scientist at EPFL’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Electron Microscopy (CIME), specializing in the application of advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques and enabling electron microscopy research activities for groups across EPFL through teaching, training and support. In 2018 he joined the Electron Spectrometry and Microscopy Laboratory (LSME) as a full-time research scientist dedicated to advancing transmission electron microscopy techniques, and was promoted to the status of Research and Teaching Associate. In 2019, together with LSME director Cécile Hébert, he launched the first MOOC on transmission electron microscopy for materials science: https://www.coursera.org/learn/microscopy/For a complete list of peer-reviewed publications, see:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4350-8587 Cécile HébertCécile Hébert was born in France in 1970. She obtained her Ingeneer degree (physics) and her PhD degree (design of a new energy filter for transmission electron microscopy, under the direction of Prof. B. Jouffrey) at the Ecole Centrale in Paris.
As a post doc with Prof. P. Schattschneider, she was working on the calculation of the fine structure of ionisation edges in EELS. As a research assistant at the Vienna University of Technology, she was one of the main participant to the CHIRALTEM project dealing with the measurement of magnetic circular dichroism in the electron microscope.
