Grégoire CourtineGrégoire Courtine was originally trained in Mathematics and Physics, but received his PhD degree in Experimental Medicine from the University of Pavia, Italy, and the INSERM Plasticity and Motricity, in France, in 2003. From 2004-2007, he held a Post-doctoral Fellow position at the Brain Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Dr. Reggie Edgerton, and was a research associate for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (CDRF). In 2008, he became Assistant Professor at the faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich where he established his own research laboratory. In 2012, he was nominated Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where he holds the International paraplegic foundation (IRP) chair in spinal cord repair at the Center for Neuroprosthetics and the Brain Mind Institute. He published several articles proposing radically new approaches for restoring function after spinal cord injury, which were discussed in national and international press extensively. He received numerous honors and awards such as the 2007 UCLA Chancellors award for excellence in post-doctoral research and the 2009 Schellenberg Prize for his innovative research in spinal cord injury awarded by the International Foundation of Research in Paraplegia.
Auke IjspeertAuke Ijspeert is a full professor at the EPFL, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL, and at the University of Southern California (USC). He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL as an SNF assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in October 2009 and to full professor in April 2016. His primary affiliation is with the Institute of Bioengineering, and secondary affiliation with the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of sensorimotor coordination in animals, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and adaptive controllers. (see for instance Ijspeert et al Science 2007, Ijspeert Science 2014, and Nyakatura et al Nature 2019). He is also investigating how to assist people with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics (e.g. TED talk given at TED Global Geneva, Dec 8 2015). With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, SAB2018, and CLAWAR 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow, member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, and associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics and for the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. He has acted as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2009-2013) and for Soft Robotics (2018-2021). He was a guest editor for the Proceedings of IEEE, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and Biological Cybernetics. He has been the organizer of 7 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006, SSRR2016, AMAM2019), and a program committee member of over 50 conferences.
Tamar Kohn2014 - present Associate Professor, EPFL and adjunct researcher, Eawag 2007 - 2013 Assistant Professor, EPFL 2004 - 2006 Postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley 2000 - 2004 PhD, Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University 1999 Diploma, Environmental Sciences, ETHZ
Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Georges WagnièresGeorges Wagnières a obtenu son diplôme (MSc) en physique à l'Université de Lausanne, Suisse, en 1986. Il a reçu son doctorat ès science (PhD) en physique (Optique Biomédicale) de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) en 1992, et a effectué un travail de postdoctorat dans les "Wellman Laboratories of Photomedicine" (Harvard Medical School) situés à Boston, MA, USA, en 1993 et 1994. Il a aussi obtenu, en 2001, un "Master in management of technology" délivré par l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) de l'Université de Lausanne et l'EPFL. Depuis 1994, il gère un groupe de recherche de l'EPFL actif dans les domaines suivants: - Caractérisation et détection de lésions cancéreuses par spectroscopie et imagerie de fluorescence ainsi que par imagerie à fort grossissement. - Traitement du cancer ainsi que d'autres pathologies associées à des désordres immunologiques (maladie de Crohn, Colite ulcéreuse) ou vasculaires par thérapie photodynamique (PDT). - Développement préclinique et clinique de photosensibilisateurs, de marqueurs fluorescents et d'instruments optiques pour le photodiagnostic. - Traitement de diverses pathologies, y compris les maladies neuro-dégénératives (Parkinson, Alzheimer), par photobiomodulation. - Monitorage de la dose optique pour la PDT basée sur l'imagerie de fluorescence de photosensibilisateurs. - Induction de l'extravasation d'agent chimiothérapeutiques par PDT. - Mesure in vivo de la concentration d'oxygène dans des tissus biologiques par spectroscopie et imagerie optiques résolues en temps. - Monitorage d'un traitement au laser de la rétine par imagerie de reflectance. - Développement de distributeurs de lumière pour des applications biomédicales. - Dosimétrie de lumière / Radiométrie. - Spectroscopie et imagerie en optique biomédicale. Georges Wagnières est aussi co-fondateur et a présidé une société "spin-off" de l'EPFL: - Medlight SA, fondée en 1997, qui développe, produit et commercialise des distributeurs de lumière pour la thérapie photodynamique. Georges Wagnières est l'auteur et co-auteur de plus de 235 articles scientifiques dont 150 ont été publiés dans des revues internationales ayant un comité de relecture (review board). De plus, il est inventeur de 18 brevets. Finalement, il supervise ou a supervisé 12 doctorants et enseigne actuellement à l'EPFL l'optique biomédicale et la photomédecine au niveaux "master". Ces cours sont aussi donnés à l'Ecole doctorale (EDCH, EDSV) de l'EPFL. Finalement, il donne le cours intitulé "Physique Générale I" aux biologistes de première année inscrits à l'Ecole de Biologie de l'Université de Lausanne. PUBLICATIONS PRINCIPALES: SVP visiter: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lifmet/wagnieres/publications/ David Andrew BarryResearch InterestsSubsurface hydrology, constructed wetlands, ecological engineering, in particular contaminant transport and remediation of soil and groundwater; more generally, models of hydrological and vadose zone processes; application of mathematical methods to hydrological processes; coastal zone sediment transport, aquifer-coastal ocean interactions; hydrodynamics and modelling of lakes.
