Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
Bernard MoretBernard M.E. Moret was born in Vevey, Switzerland, received baccalauréats in Latin-Greek and Latin-Mathematics, then did a Diploma in Electrical Engineering at EPFL. After working for 2 years for Omega and Swiss Timing on the development of real-time OS for sports applications, he left for the US. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the U. of Tennessee in 1980 and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM) that fall. He served as Chairman of the department from 1991 till 1993 and eventually retired in summer 2006 to join the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. (You can read about his work at UNM on his (archived) personal and laboratory web pages at UNM.) He was appointed group leader for phylogenetics at the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB). From 2009 until his retirement, he was also in charge of the BS and MS programs in Computer Science and Associate Dean for Education. He founded the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA) and served as its Editor-in-Chief for 7 years; he also helped found the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB), where he served as Associate Editor until 2008. He founded the annual Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI) and chairs its steering committee, and he serves on the steering committee of the Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX). Until summer 2008, he chaired the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH); now he is a charter member of the NIH College of Reviewers. He led a team of over 50 biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians in the CIPRES (Cyber Infrastructure for Phylogenetic Research) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for US$ 12 million over 5 years. He has published nearly 150 papers in computational biology, under funding from the US NSF, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the IBM Corporation, the US NIH, the Swiss NSF, and SystemsX.ch. He is a Fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology). His Erdös number is 2 and (as of 2020) his h-index is 48.
Philippe ThalmannPhilippe Thalmann was born in Lausanne in 1963. He graduated in Economics from the University of Lausanne in 1984, where he earned a postgraduate diploma in Economics in 1986. Mr. Thalmann entered the doctoral program in Economics of Harvard University (Cambridge, U.S.A.) in 1986, which he completed with a Ph.D. in 1990. His dissertation is entitled: "Essays in the Economics of Government Revenues and Spending". Returning to Switzerland, he was hired as an assistant professor first at the University of Geneva (teachings in Public Economics), then at the University of Lausanne (teachings in Econometrics and Introductory Economics). Since 1994, Mr. Thalmann is associate professor of Economics as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne.
Anton SchleissProf. Dr. Anton J. Schleiss graduated in Civil Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1978. After joining the Laboratory of Hydraulic, Hydrology and Glaciology at ETH as a research associate and senior assistant, he obtained a Doctorate of Technical Sciences on the topic of pressure tunnel design in 1986. After that he worked for 11 years for Electrowatt Engineering Ltd. (now Pöyry) in Zurich and was involved in the design of many hydropower projects around the world as an expert on hydraulic engineering and underground waterways. Until 1996 he was Head of the Hydraulic Structures Section in the Hydropower Department at Electrowatt. In 1997, he was nominated full professor and became Director of the Laboratory of Hydraulic Constructions (LCH) in the Civil Engineering Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). The LCH activities comprise education, research and services in the field of both fundamental and applied hydraulics and design of hydraulic structures and schemes. The research focuses on the interaction between water, sediment-rock, air and hydraulic structures as well as associated environmental issues and involves both numerical and physical modeling of water infrastructures. In May 2018, he became Honorary Professor at EPFL. More than 50 PhD and Postdoc research projects have been carried out under his guidance. From 1999 to 2009 he was Director of the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) in Water Resources Management and Hydraulic Engineering held in Lausanne in collaboration with ETH Zurich and the universities of Innsbruck (Austria), Munich (Germany), Grenoble (France) and Liège (Belgium). From 2006 to 2012 he was the Head of the Civil Engineering program of EPFL and chairman of the Swiss Committee on Dams (SwissCOLD). In 2006, he obtained the ASCE Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Price as well as the J. C. Stevens Award. He was listed in 2011 among the 20 international personalities that “have made the biggest difference to the sector Water Power & Dam Construction over the last 10 years”. Between 2014 and 2017 he was Council member of International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and he was chair of the Europe Regional Division of IAHR until 2016. For his outstanding contributions to advance the art and science of hydraulic structures engineering he obtained in 2015 the ASCE-EWRI Hydraulic Structures Medal. The French Hydro Society (SHF) awarded him with the Grand Prix SHF 2018. After having served as vice-president between 2012 and 2015 he was president of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) from 2015 to 2018. On behalf of ICOLD he his the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 project "Hydropower Europe". With more than 40 years of experience he is regularly involved as a consultant and expert in large water infrastructures projects including hydropower and dams all over the world. Awards (besides those mentioned above): ASCE-Journal of Hydraulic Engineering Outstanding Reviewer Recognition 2013 ASCE-EWRI-Journal of Hydraulic Engineering 2014 Best Technical Note
Alfredo PasquarelloAlfredo Pasquarello studied physics at the
Scuola Normale Superiore
of Pisa and at the University of Pisa, obtaining their respective degrees in 1986. He obtained a doctoral degree at the EPFL in 1991 with a thesis on
Multiphoton Transitions in Solids
. Then, he moved to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill (New Jersey), where he carried out postdoctoral research on the magnetic properties of carbon fullerenes. In 1993, he joined the Institute for Numerical Research in the Physics of Materials (IRRMA), where his activity involved first-principles simulation methods. In 1998, he was awarded the EPFL Latsis Prize for his research work on disordered silica materials. Succeeding in grant programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he then set up his own research group at IRRMA. In July 2003, he is appointed Professor in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at EPFL. Currently, he leads the Chair of Atomic Scale Simulation.