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/ Drazen DujicDrazen Dujic is an Associate Professor and Head of the Power Electronics Laboratory at EPFL. He received the Dipl.Ing. and MSc degrees from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and the PhD degree from Liverpool John Moores University, UK in 2008. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Assistant with the Faculty of Technical Sciences at University of Novi Sad. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Research Associate with Liverpool John Moores University. After that he moved to industry and joined ABB Switzerland Ltd, where from 2009 to 2013, he was Scientist and then Principal Scientist with ABB Corporate Research Center in Baden-Dättwil, and from 2013 to 2014 he was R&D Platform Manager with ABB Medium Voltage Drives in Turgi. He joined EPFL in 2014 as Tenure Track Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. His research interests include the areas of design and control of advanced high power electronic systems and high-performance drives, predominantly for the medium voltage applications related to electrical energy generation, conversion and storage. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 scientific publications and has filed 16 patents. In 2018 he received EPE Outstanding Service Award from European Power Electronics and Drives Association and in 2014 the Isao Takahashi Power Electronics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Power Electronics. He is Senior Member of IEEE, and serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and IET Electric Power Applications. He is Chairman of the Swiss IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) Chapter and IEEE PELS R8 Chair.
Alfred RuferOriginaire de Diessbach (BE), Alfred Rufer est né en 1951. Il obtient en 1976 le diplôme d'ingénieur électricien de l'EPFL et poursuit son activité dans le même établissement en tant qu'assistant à la chaire d'électronique industrielle. En 1993, il est nommé professeur-assistant au Laboratoire d'électronique industrielle. Au début 1996, il est nommé professeur extraordinaire. En 1978, il débute son activité dans l'industrie de l'électronique de grande puissance à la société ABB, Asea Brown Boveri à Turgi, où il contribue au développement d'entraînements réglés à fréquence variable. Dès 1985, il exerce la fonction d'assistant technique et de chef de groupe. De 1988 à 1991, il poursuit le développement de nouveaux systèmes d'électronique de puissance dans différents domaines d'application. A. Rufer est l'auteur et co-auteur de plusieurs demandes de brevet, ainsi que de plusieurs publications. De 1991 à 1992, il est chef d'un département de développement d'appareils d'électronique de réglage et de commande pour l'électronique de puissance. Durant son activité professionnelle dans l'industrie, il participe activement à l'enseignement technique dans plusieurs écoles d'ingénieurs.
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).
Paul MuraltPaul Muralt received a diploma in experimental physics in 1978 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich. He accomplished his Ph.D. thesis in the field of commensurate-incommensurate phase transitions at the Solid State Laboratory of ETH. In the years 1984 and 1985 he held a post doctoral position at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich where he pioneered the application of scanning tunneling microscopy to surface potential imaging. In 1987, after a stay at the Free University of Berlin, he joined the Balzers group in Liechtenstein. He specialized in sputter deposition techniques, and managed since 1991 a department for development and applications of Physical Vapor Deposition and PECVD processes. In 1993, he joined the Ceramics Laboratory of EPFL in Lausanne. AS group leader for thin films and MEMS devices, he specialized in piezoelectric and pyroelectric MEMS with mostly Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 and AlN thin film. His research interests are in thin film growth in general, and more specifically in property assessment of small ferroelectric structures, in integration issues of ferroelectric and other polar materials, property-microstructure relationships, and applications of polar materials in semiconductor and micro-electro-mechanical devices. More recently he extended his interests to oxide thin films of ionic conductors. The focus in piezoelectric thin films was directed towards AlN-ScN alloys. He gives lectures in thin film processing, micro fabrication, and surface analysis. He authored or co-authored more than 230 scientific articles. He became Fellow of IEEE in 2013. In 2005, he received an outstanding achievement award at the International Symposium on Integrated Ferroelectrics (ISIF), and in 2016 the B.C. Sawyer Memorial award.
Chairman of the International Workshops on Piezoelectric MEMS(http://www.piezomems2011.org/) Alexander TagantsevALEXANDER K. TAGANTSEV received the B.S. degree from St. Petersburg State University, in 1974, and Ph.D. degree from Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1982 in solid state physics. Before 1993, he worked in Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, (1991-1993, head of laboratory), and St. Petersburg State Technical University (1991-1993, professor). He joined the ceramics laboratory of EPFL in 1993 where he was leading ( up to 2016) the section for Modeling and theory of Electroceramics. He is also currently engaged as a principle research fellow at Ioffe institute (St. Petersburg, Russia). Tagantsev is a theoretician of a broad domain of expertise from ferroelectricity and phonon physics to electrodynamics of superconductors and quantum optics. He is the author of key results on the theory of microwave dielectrics loss, dielectric polarization in crystalline materials, and relaxor ferroelectricity. He is also known in the field of ferroelectric thin films for elucidating works on the polarization switching and degradation in these systems. He authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific articles and two monograph (on domains in ferroics and tunable film bulk acoustic wave resonators). In 2007, Prof. Tagantsev was entitled to the Honors for lifetime achievement in the field of integrated ferroelectrics by the International Symposium on Integrated Ferroelectrics.
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.
