Ambrogio FasoliAmbrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.
Gloria Serra CochGlòria Serra Coch is an architect by the Polytechnique School of Catalonia (UPC), Architecture School of Barcelona. During her studies and after graduation, she assisted the research team Architecture, Energy and Environment (AiEM), exploring methods of integrating renewable energies in cities as well as finding ways of measuring the impact of urban morphology in energetic parameters.In 2017, she obtained la Caixa Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies to pursue a MS. in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York. She graduated with a concentration in Urban Analytics and won the Planning Practice Thesis Award, for analyzing the impact of mapping in the historical planning of New York City neighborhoods. At Columbia, she assisted researching the effects of mobility networks in social accessibility, using GIS public data to map individual opportunity based on time-space daily constraints.After graduation, she combined professional practice with academics and research. She started working in the Urban Planning team of CallisonRTKL, where she also got involved with the newly created research division and participated in the first Digital Evolution Lab. At the same time, she also assisted, as adjunct professor, a joint architecture-urban planning studio of Columbia University focused on Puerto Rico’s inner connectivity.
Maria Anna HecherMaria Anna Hecher obtained her PhD degree at the University of Graz, Austria and the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Germany. In her research she investigates energy transitions from a socio-technical perspective with a special focus on individual adoption decisions in the building sector to derive strategies and policy recommendations fostering sustainable energy transitions. Therefore, she pursues an interdisciplinary approach combining environmental and social science methods. After her PhD, she had the chance to put her knowledge into practice and managed a three-year program on regional sustainabiltiy projects in an energy region in Styria, Austria. In cooperation with local decision-makers, public authorities, schools, companies and the local population, she realized projects in the field of renewable energy and sustainable mobility. She worked as a consultant in an energy agency for and in the city of Graz, Austria. She managed projects in the field of e-mobility and spatial energy planning collaborating with public authorities, energy suppliers, city planners and research institutions. Her work in recent years, has been performed mostly in an inter- and transdisciplinary setting integrating knowledge from different scientific disciplines and fields of practice at the interface between research, politics and society.
