Vitor Pessoa ColomboVitor grew up in São Paulo (Brazil) and studied architecture in Switzerland (B.Sc. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, M.Sc. Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio). Since 2016, he has conducted research on urbanization processes in cities of the global South. He has focused his research on "citizen mapping" methods that provide spatial information useful to support the improvement of vulnerable human settlements in cities marked by socio-spatial segregation. Now he conducts a PhD project at EPFL's CEAT unit to investigate how different urban morphologies relate to the occurence of diarrhoeal diseases in the context of rapid and largely informal urbanization processes.
Florian Frédéric Vincent BreiderFlorian Breider obtained his PhD in the field of the stable isotope biogeochemistry from the University of Neuchatel in 2013. This was followed by seven months of postdoc at EPFL in the Atmospheric Particles Research Laboratory and two years as research associate at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) where he conducted studies on nitrous oxide biogeochemistry in oceans. From 2015 to 2018, he was research scientist in the Laboratory for Water Quality and Treatment at EPFL where he conducted research on disinfection by-products and antibiotic resistant bacteria. Since May 2018, he is director of the Central Environmental Laboratory at the Institute of Environmental Engineering of EPFL.
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).
Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
