Christian DepeursingeChristian Depeursinge is the leader of the Microvision and Micro-Diagnostics (MVD) group at the Advanced Photonics Laboratory of the Institute of Microengineering at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland (http://apl.epfl.ch/muvision). His research and expertise in biomedical engineering and optics is internationally acknowledged. His current research topics include coherent and incoherent Imaging applied to diagnostics in biology, His research group pioneered in the development of DHM technology. He worked on several projects developed in cooperation with European and international partners. He is author and co-author of over 100 papers published in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and more than 30 patents. He has given more than 20 invited lectures and plenaries in the last five years. He developed many projects in cooperation with national and international industries. He is co-founder of a start-up company (Lyncée Tec SA: www.Lynceetec.com). He is currently teaching at EPFL and occasionally in foreign universities and institutes. Stewart ColeProfessor Stewart Cole is an international authority in bacterial molecular-genetics and genomics. He has made outstanding contributions in several fields including: bacterial anaerobic electron transport; genome analysis of retroviruses and papillomaviruses; antibiotic resistance mechanisms; and the molecular microbiology of toxigenic clostridia. His studies on isoniazid and multidrug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, together with his pioneering work on the pathogenicity, evolution and genomics of the tubercle and leprosy bacilli, have made him an undisputed leader in the field of mycobacterial research. The findings of his research are of direct relevance to public health and disease-control in both the developing world and the industrialised nations. He has published over 250 scientific papers and review articles, and holds many patents.
Lukas KühnLukas Kühn graduated in biochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He received his PhD in 1979 for a thesis with Jean-Pierre Kraehenbuhl at the University of Lausanne. After postdoctoral work in Lausanne and with Frank Ruddle at Yale University, USA, he became group leader at ISREC in 1984, was promoted senior scientist in 1988 and EPFL Adjunct Professor (professeur titulaire) in June 2008.
Daniel ThalmannProf. Daniel Thalmann is Honorary Professor at EPFL and Director of Research development at MIRALab Sarl. He has been Visiting Professor at The Institute for Media Innovation (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) from 2009 to 2017. He is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, crowd simulation, and 3D Interaction. Daniel Thalmann has been the Founder of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland, Professor at The University of Montreal and Visiting Professor/ Researcher at CERN, University of Nebraska, University of Tokyo, and National University of Singapore. Until October 2010, he was the President of the Swiss Association of Research in Information Technology and one Director of the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, and member of the editorial board of 6 other journals. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Program Chair and CoChair of several conferences including IEEE VR, ACM VRST, and ACM VRCAI. Daniel Thalmann has published more than 500 papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books, and coauthor of several books including 'Crowd Simulation' (second edition 2012) and 'Stepping Into Virtual Reality' (2007), published by Springer. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul- Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. He also received the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award in 2010 and the 2012 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thalmann Yves PerriardYves Perriard was born in Lausanne in 1965. He received the M. Sc. in Microengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne (EPFL) in 1989 and the Ph D. degree in 1992. Co-founder of Micro-Beam SA, he was CEO of this company involved in high precision electric drive. Senior lecturer from 1998 and professor since 2003, he is currently director of Laboratory of Integrated Actuators. His research interests are in the field of new actuator design and associated electronic devices. In 2009, he is appointed Vice-Director of the Microengineering Institute in Neuchâtel until 2011. In 2013 the Federal Council has named him the the CTI commission in Bern. In 2014 he is appointed guest professor at Zhejiang University in China. In 2017, the lab is granted by the Werner Siemens Foundation of an amount of 12 millions CHF in order to set up a new Center for Artificial Muscules. Since 2018, he is Expert with Innosuisse, the new Swiss Innovation Agency. http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=fr&user=V2onuO8AAAAJ https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-12-million-franc-donation-to-create-a-center-for/ Michael GraetzelProfessor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in building integrated photovoltaics. They engendered perovskite solar cells (PSCs) which turned into the most exciting break-through in the history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. His over 1500 publications have received some 220’000 citations with an h-factor of 218 (SI-Web of Science) demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.