Giorgio MargaritondoDe nationalité américaine et suisse, Giorgio Margaritondo est né à Rome (Italie) en 1946. Il a reçu la Laurea cum laude en physique de l'Université de Rome en 1969. De 1969 à 1978, il a travaillé pour le Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), à Rome, à Frascati et, pendant la période 1975-1977, chez Bell Laboratories aux Etats-Unis. De 1978 à 1990, il est professeur de physique à l'Université du Wisconsin, à Madison (Etats-Unis); en 1984, il est nommé vice-directeur au Centre de rayonnement synchrotron de la même université. En 1990, il est engagé à l'EPFL comme professeur ordinaire et dirige l'Institut de physique appliquée au Département de physique. Il a été également membre honoraire du corps professoral de l'Université Vanderbilt à Nashville. En 2001 il a été nommé doyen de la Faculté des sciences de base de l'EPFL; en 2004, il a été nommé Vice-président pour les affaires académiques.; en 2010 et jusqu'à sa retraite de l'EPFL en 2016 il est devenu Doyen de la formation continue. A côté de ses cours de physique générale, son activité de recherche porte sur la physique des semiconducteurs et des supraconducteurs (états électroniques, surfaces, interfaces) et des systèmes biologiques; ses principales méthodes expérimentales sont la spectroscopie et la spectromicroscopie électroniques, l'imagerie aux rayons x et la microscopie SNOM, y compris les expériences avec le rayonnement synchrotron et le laser à électrons libres. Auteur d'environ 700 articles scientifiques et de 9 livres, il a aussi été responsable de 1995 à 1998 des programmes scientifiques du Synchrotron ELETTRA à Trieste. Depuis 1997, il a été le coordinateur de la table ronde de la Commission européenne pour le rayonnement synchrotron, et président du conseil de la "Integrated Initiative" de la Commission européenne pour les synchrotrons et les lasers à électrons libres (IA-SFS, ensuite ELISA), le plus grand réseau au monde de laboratoires dans ce domaine. En 2011-2015, il a été Editor-in-Chief du Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). A présent, il est vice-président du conseil de l'Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) et président du Scientific and Technological Committee de l'Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). Il est "Fellow" de l'American Physical Society et de l'American Vacuum Society; il est également "Fellow and Chartered Physicist" de l'Institute of Physics.
César PulgarinProf. C. Pulgarin is Chemist from Lausanne University, Master in environmental chemistry from Geneva University, Ph D in synthesis bio-inspired of natural substances from Neuchâtel University. During his education he carried out several industrial trainings.
Since March 1989, he has been working at the EPFL where he is leader of the Advanced Oxidation Processes Group (GPAO) active in the development chemical, photochemical, electrochemical, ultrasonic processes, their coupling between them and with biological systems to degrade chemical and microbiological pollutants in water and air. He has an H index of 40 and he is the world most cited author in 1) TiO2 photo-assisted bacterial inactivation in water and 2) Coupling of photochemical and biological processes for pollutant degradation. He has been involved in ten African, South American and European international research projects. He has been Swiss representative in COST program 540.
Ileana-Cristina Benea-ChelmusIleana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus is an Assistant Professor of Microengineering at the Institute of Electro and Microengineering at EPFL since January 2022. She is also a Research Associate affiliated with the group of Prof. Federico Capasso at Harvard University.
Prior to her appointment, she was a Postdoctoral scientist and SNF fellow in the group of Prof. Federico Capasso at Harvard University, USA in the John A. Harvard school of engineering and applied sciences since March 2019 to December 2021. She lead efforts on tunable metasurfaces enabled by nonlinear optics, supported through a personal grant from the Hans-Eggenberger Foundation. Apart from science, she was actively driving advocacy work within the postdoctoral association at Harvard.
She holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (2010) and a Master Degree with distinction in Optics and Photonics (2013) – both from KIT, Germany. During her master, she spent one year at EPFL (2011) as an ERASMUS Exchange student in Physics, where she acquired in-depth knowledge of solid-state physics, quantum mechanics and biotechnology. During her Bachelor, she received a stipend from the Anna-Ruths Foundation. In the summer of 2009, she was awarded a research stipend from DAAD “Rise in North America” to perform a summer internship at Vanderbilt University, TN, and became a scholar of SyBBURE. For her Master studies, Ileana-Cristina was awarded an excellence stipend from the Karlsruhe School of Optics and Photonics which she absolved with merits. She was selected to participate in extended carrier building programs such as "Female talents at IBM and KIT" as well as "Femtec". She did a summer internship at IMEC in Belgium and IBM Research in Zurich under the supervision of Dr. Armin Knoll. For her Master thesis she decided to join the group of Prof. Jérôme Faist and work on terahertz quantum cascade lasers and their applications in spectroscopy. She continued with her Ph.D. thesis in the same lab on quantum science. She started very early to drive a substantial proportion of the research work done in the framework of an ERC Advanced grant. She developed, as the first one in this field, the research branch of time-domain quantum optics at terahertz frequencies. She developed ultrasensitive time-domain detectors.
She received several awards so far
2021
PRIMA independent research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation,
2019
Hans Eggenberger Prize and Independent Project Grant (Junior Principal Investigator),
2019
SNSF Early Mobility Fellowship Grant,
2019
Ph.D. thesis prize of the European Physical Society – QEOD (awarded every two years),
2019
Ph.D. thesis prize from the Swiss Physical Society in the area of Metrology (awarded every year),
2017
1st place best student presentation award at IRMMW, Cancun, Mexico,
2017
best student paper award at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco, USA,
2016
best student paper award at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco, USA,
2012
KSOP master scholarship,
2011
FEMTEC career building program for female students in STEM fields,
2010
IBM and KIT female talents,
2009
DAAD Rise in North America
2009
SyBBURE for summer internship at Vanderbilt, TN, USA,
2008
Anna-Ruths undergraduate scholarship.
She engages with various communities, centers and associations at EPFL and Harvard.