Marc-Edouard Baptiste Grégoire SchultheissMarc-Édouard Schultheiss is a doctoral student at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology at EPFL. He is interested in multi-day and multi-person activity-travel behaviours analyses, and he questions the effect of habits and routines on the resistances to change in the context of urban mobility practices. His research work focuses on the mechanisms of modal shift and leverages the potential of raw geolocation data and open-data for city planning.
Yves PedrazziniYves Pedrazzini is MER / Senior Scientist in the Laboratory of Urban Sociology (LaSUR), Faculty of Natural, Architectural and Build Environment (ENAC) of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL). For more than 20 years, he analyses urban dynamics, social practices, urban cultures, violence and insecurity phenomena, in North and South countries. In 1987, he began ethnographical studies of youth armed gangs in Latin-American slums, developing innovative qualitative methods to make them real protagonists of the research process. Since 1997, Yves Pedrazzini added to his urban experience in Latin America (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela) new expertise of African urban contexts (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal). He published many books and articles on urban violence and Security/insecurity issues, from a sociological and anthropological point of view.
Maxime Carl FelderMaxime Felder holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Geneva. His dissertation - "Building familiarity. Coexistence in an urban context" - dealt with how urbanites manage to coexist peacefully, in a residential context, without knowing each other personally. He is now involved in a new research project on cities' hospitality towards newcomers.
Sila KaratasSıla Karataş (1987, Ankara) was graduated as architect and awarded Master’s degree with the thesis “Building Marshall Plan in Turkey: The Formation of Workers’ Housing Question, 1946-1962” at the Middle East Technical University. In her thesis, she analyzed the formation of postwar workers’ housing discourse concerning the policy, planning and architecture of workers’ housing cooperatives within the framework of the ideological and spatial programming of the Marshall Plan and Americanization in Turkey. This research received Honourable Mention in 'Young Social Scientists Awards' of the Turkish Social Sciences Association. She worked as assistant and lecturer in Turkey between 2012-2019; took part in architectural and urban design studios as tutor and reviewer, gave Case Studies in Social Housing and Community Planning among other courses. Since September 2019, she is a PhD student and doctoral assistant at EPFL. Her PhD research concerns postwar workers’ housing programs of the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan (France, Italy, Greece, Turkey), and is a comparative analysis of local models in relation to the transnational activity by the United States and multilateral organizations on postwar development, labour affairs and housing. This research is awarded a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for PhD and being funded by the Swiss Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Scholars and Artists (FCS).
Luisa PastoreWith a background in Architectural Engineering, Luisa specialised in sustainable architecture, bioclimatic design and comfort in buildings through a PhD from the University of Palermo (2013) followed by a Post-doc at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID) of EPFL (2014-2019).She is currently a Scientific Collaborator at the Smart Living Lab - EPFL and professor of Material Behaviour and Architecture and Energy Concept at the Ecole d’Architecture et d’Architecture d’Intérieur – idées House of Lausanne.She also works as Coordinator for the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction where she acts as a liaison between the Academic Committee and the core Management Office of the Foundation. Besides the coordination of the AC's agenda, she supports the organization of events and competitions for the promotion of innovative sustainable design solutions that can tackle today's environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural issues affecting the built environment.Since 2021 she has also joined Amber Lion Partners as Impact and Sustainability Advisor.
Vitor Pessoa ColomboVitor grew up in São Paulo (Brazil) and studied architecture in Switzerland (B.Sc. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, M.Sc. Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio). Since 2016, he has conducted research on urbanization processes in cities of the global South. He has focused his research on "citizen mapping" methods that provide spatial information useful to support the improvement of vulnerable human settlements in cities marked by socio-spatial segregation. Now he conducts a PhD project at EPFL's CEAT unit to investigate how different urban morphologies relate to the occurence of diarrhoeal diseases in the context of rapid and largely informal urbanization processes.
