Frédéric CourbinAfter 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.
Marilyne AndersenMarilyne Andersen is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and heads the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) that she launched in the Fall of 2010. She was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL from 2013 to 2018 and is the Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg. She also co-leads the Student Kreativity and Innovation Laboratory (SKIL) at ENAC. Before joining EPFL as a faculty, she was an Assistant Professor then Associate Professor tenure-track in the Building Technology Group of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and the Head of the MIT Daylighting Lab that she founded in 2004. She has also been Invited Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2019. Marilyne Andersen owns a Master of Science in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD in Building Physics at EPFL in the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) and as a Visiting Scholar in the Building Technologies Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Her research lies at the interface between science, engineering and architectural design with a dedicated emphasis on the impact of daylight on building occupants. Focused on questions of comfort, perception and health and their implications on energy considerations, these research efforts aim towards a deeper integration of the design process with daylighting performance and indoor comfort, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. She is leveraging this research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a startup company she co-founded, which offers specialized consulting services on daylight performance and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants. She is the author of more than 200 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences and the recipient of several grants and awards including: the Daylight Award for Research (2016), eleven publication awards and distinctions (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019) including the Taylor Technical Talent Award 2009 granted by the Illuminating Engineering Society, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant (2009), the Mitsui Career Development Professorship at MIT (2008) and the EPFL prize of the Chorafas Foundation awarded to her PhD thesis in Sustainability (2005). Her research or teaching has been supported by professional, institutional and industrial organizations such as: the Swiss and the U.S. National Science Foundations, the Velux Foundation, the European Horizon 2020 program, the Boston Society of Architects, the MIT Energy Initiative and InnoSuisse. She was the leader and faculty advisor of the Swiss Team and its NeighborHub project, who won the U.S. Solar Decathlon 2017 competition with 8 podiums out of 10 contests. She is a member of the Board of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and Head of its Academic Committee. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Building and Environment by Elsevier, and of the journals LEUKOS (of the Illuminating Engineering Society) and Buildings and Cities, by Taylor and Francis. She is expert to the Innovation Council of InnoSuisse and Founding member as well as Board member of the Foundation Culture du Bâti (CUB), and is also founding member of the Daylight Academy and an active member of several committees of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and International Commission on Illumination (CIE).
Christophe AnceyChristophe Ancey has both a PhD and an engineering degree granted by the Ecole Centrale de Paris and the Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute. Trained as a hydraulics engineer, he did his doctoral work under the supervision of Pierre Evesque from 1994 to 1997 on rheology of granular flows in simple shearing. He was recruited in 1998 as a researcher in rheology at the Cemagref as part of the Erosion Protection team directed by Jean-Pierre Feuvrier, which has since become the laboratoire "Storm Erosion, Snow and Avalanche Laboratory". Parallel to this research activity, with Claude Charlier He set up a consulting firm for engineering contracting called Toraval (www.toraval.fr), which has become the major player in the avalanche field in France. Since 2004, He is a fluid-mechanics professor at EPFL and he is the director of the Environmental Hydraulics Laboratory.
He is associate editor of Water Resources Research, one of the leading journal in the field. Paolo RicciPaolo Ricci earned his masters degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin (Italy) in 2000. His doctoral studies were conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with focus on kinetic simulation of magnetic reconnection in the Earth's magnetotail. He spent two-and-a-half years as a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College's Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he worked on gyrokinetic simulations of the Z pinch. He joined the EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), as a EURATOM fellow in 2006, was named Tenure Track Assistant Professor in June 2010, and Associate Professor in August 2016. He is at the head of the SPC theory group. Paolo Ricci is the recipient of the 2016 Section de Physique Teaching Prize and of the 2021 Craie d'Or award from the EPFL physics bachelor students.
Karl AbererKarl Aberer received his PhD in mathematics in 1991 from the ETH Zürich. From 1991 to 1992 he was postdoctoral fellow at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he joined the Integrated Publication and Information Systems institute (IPSI) of GMD in Germany, where he was leading the research division Open Adaptive Information Management Systems. In 2000 he joined EPFL as full professor. Since 2005 he is the director of the Swiss National Research Center for Mobile Information and Communication Systems (
NCCR-MICS, www.mics.ch
). He is member of the editorial boards of VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and World Wide Web Journal. He has been consulting for the Swiss government in research and science policy as a member of the Swiss Research and Technology Council (
SWTR
) from 2003 - 2011. 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).
Anthony Christopher DavisonAnthony Davison has published on a wide range of topics in statistical theory and methods, and on environmental, biological and financial applications. His main research interests are statistics of extremes, likelihood asymptotics, bootstrap and other resampling methods, and statistical modelling, with a particular focus on the first currently. Statistics of extremes concerns rare events such as storms, high winds and tides, extreme pollution episodes, sporting records, and the like. The subject has a long history, but under the impact of engineering and environmental problems has been an area of intense development in the past 20 years. Davison''s PhD work was in this area, in a project joint between the Departments of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, with the aim of modelling potential high exposures to radioactivity due to releases from nuclear installations. The key tools developed, joint with Richard Smith, were regression models for exceedances over high thresholds, which generalized earlier work by hydrologists, and formed the basis of some important later developments. This has led to an ongoing interest in extremes, and in particular their application to environmental and financial data. A major current interest is the development of suitable methods for modelling rare spatio-temporal events, particularly but not only in the context of climate change. Likelihood asymptotics too have undergone very substantial development since 1980. Key tools here have been saddlepoint and related approximations, which can give remarkably accurate approximate distribution and density functions even for very small sample sizes. These approximations can be used for wide classes of parametric models, but also for certain bootstrap and resampling problems. The literature on these methods can seem arcane, but they are potentially widely applicable, and Davison wrote a book joint with Nancy Reid and Alessandra Brazzale intended to promote their use in applications. Bootstrap methods are now used in many areas of application, where they can provide a researcher with accurate inferences tailor-made to the data available, rather than relying on large-sample or other approximations of doubtful validity. The key idea is to replace analytical calculations of biases, variances, confidence and prediction intervals, and other measures of uncertainty with computer simulation from a suitable statistical model. In a nonparametric situation this model consists of the data themselves, and the simulation simply involves resampling from the existing data, while in a parametric case it involves simulation from a suitable parametric model. There is a wide range of possibilities between these extremes, and the book by Davison and Hinkley explores these for many data examples, with the aim of showing how and when resampling methods succeed and why they can fail. He was Editor of Biometrika (2008-2017), Joint Editor of Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, series B (2000-2003), editor of the IMS Lecture Notes Monograph Series (2007), Associate Editor of Biometrika (1987-1999), and Associate Editor of the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics (1987 2006). Currently he on the editorial board of Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications. He has served on committees of Royal Statistical Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Assocation and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a Chartered Statistician. In 2009 he was awarded a laurea honoris causa in Statistical Science by the University of Padova, in 2011 he held a Francqui Chair at Hasselt University, and in 2012 he was Mitchell Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he received the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society and in 2018 was a Medallion Lecturer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
