Centre of Learning Sciences

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Dr. Mondada received his M.Sc. in micro-engineering in 1991 and his Doctoral degree in 1997 at EPFL. During his thesis he co-founded the company K-Team, being both CEO and president of the company for about 5 years. He is one of the three main developers of the Khepera robot, considered as a standard in bio-inspired robotics and used by more than 1,000 universities and research centers worldwide. Fully back in research in 2000 and after a short period at CALTECH, he participated to the SWARM-BOTS project as the main developer of the s-bot robot platform, which was ranked on position 39 in the list of The 50 Best Robots Ever (fiction or real) by the Wired Journal in 2006. The SWARM-BOTS project was selected as FET-IST success story by the EU commission. He is author of more than 100 papers in the field of bio-inspired robotics and system level robot design. He is co-editor of several international conference proceedings. In November 2005 he received the EPFL Latsis University prize for his contributions to bio-inspired robotics. In 2011 he received the "Crédit Suisse Award for Best Teaching" from EPFL and in 2012 the "polysphère" award from the students as best teacher in the school of engineering. His interests include the development of innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile and modular robots, the creation of know-how for future embedded applications, and making robot platforms more accessible for education, research, and industrial development.

Helena is a social scientist with an appetite for a wide variety of topics related to education. Her current work focuses on exploring changes in teaching methods and approaches, strategies of adaptability, and pedagogical innovations at EPFL. Next to this, Helena works on developing a better understanding of teaching and learning transversal skills, with a particular interest in teaching ethics across the engineering curriculum, and she also works on examining the aspects of project based learning from students' and teachers' perspectives. In her previous work, Helena has done research on characteristics of teacher learning in innovative learning environments in schools across Hungary and Portugal, and she has also worked on studying identity formation through curricular material, such as history and language textbooks, across the Balkan countries. Helena holds a PhD in educational sciences obtained as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and from University of Lisbon, and a MA in educational policy and management from Aarhus University and Deusto University thought the Erasmus Mundus scholarship. She has worked as a consultant for Technopolis Group in UK and prior to that Helena was a trainee with the Directorate -General for Education and Culture at the European Commission.

I studied Psychology as a major and Computer Science as a minor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. My Master thesis which I did at Max-Planck-Institute for Psychological Research in Munich with Prof. Günter Knoblich was in the field of social cognition.The interest in applied research made me join the lab of Prof. Friedrich Hesse at the Knowlegde Media Research Center (KMRC) in Tübingen for my PhD in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). I investigated the benefit of knowledge awareness, i.e. knowing what the other learners in the group know, for communication and collaboration. The CHILI lab of Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg at EPFL welcomed me for a visiting PhD stay.After the PhD I worked at the University of Fribourg on gender-equal university teaching with Prof. Bernadette Charlier and Helene Füger. Later I joined EPFL as a postdoc in a project on technology-enhanced vocational training (Dual-T). During 4 years I worked on pedagogical innovation in the EdTech startup Coorpacademy which is part of the Swiss EdTech Collider. While I am grateful for the rich experiences outside of academia, I returned to EPFL when the Center for Learning Sciences opened in 2018 to take the challenge of being its executive director.