Jürgen BruggerI am a Professor of Microengineering and co-affiliated to Materials Science. Before joining EPFL I was at the MESA Research Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, and at the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, in Tokyo, Japan. I received a Master in Physical-Electronics and a PhD degree from Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Research in my laboratory focuses on various aspects of MEMS and Nanotechnology. My group contributes to the field at the fundamental level as well as in technological development, as demonstrated by the start-ups that spun off from the lab. In our research, key competences are in micro/nanofabrication, additive micro-manufacturing, new materials for MEMS, increasingly for wearable and biomedical applications. Together with my students and colleagues we published over 200 peer-refereed papers and I had the pleasure to supervise over 25 PhD students. Former students and postdocs have been successful in receiving awards and starting their own scientific careers. I am honoured for the appointment in 2016 as Fellow of the IEEE “For contributions to micro and nano manufacturing technology”. In 2017 my lab was awarded an ERC AdvG in the field of advanced micro-manufacturing.
Mor-Miri MishkovskyI am a chemist, graduated Cum Laude in 2002 from Tel Aviv University in Israel. I obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel on the development of new technology for rapid detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic data aiming at reducing the measurement time from hour to a fraction of seconds. My thesis “Methodological Developments in Ultrafast Multidimensional NMR” granted me the Auto Swartz excellence award in 2007. Since 2009 I am working with the Laboratory of Functional and Metabolic Imaging at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, on the development of hyperpolarized (HP) magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) methodologies for monitoring biochemical processes in real-time.My research is focused on the development of Magnetic Resonance (MR) Molecular Imaging by dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (dDNP). HP agents to interrogate biochemical processes in real-time are applied in vivo in the healthy brain and disease models, aiming at improving our understanding of cerebral function and metabolism toward better clinical diagnostics and therapy.
Michael GraetzelProfessor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in building integrated photovoltaics. They engendered perovskite solar cells (PSCs) which turned into the most exciting break-through in the history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. His over 1500 publications have received some 220’000 citations with an h-factor of 218 (SI-Web of Science) demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.
Harald BruneOriginaire de Münich en Allemagne, né en 1961, Harald Brune obtient son diplôme en physique de l'Université Ludwig Maximilians en 1989. Après une thèse en chimie physique à l'Institut Fritz-Haber de la Société Max-Planck à Berlin il obtient son titre de docteur ès sciences en 1992. Dès cela, il rejoint le groupe du Prof. K. Kern à l'Institut de physique expérimentale à l'EPFL. En 1995 il est chercheur invité à Copenhague travaillant en modélisation chez le Prof. J. Nørskov. De retour à l'EPFL, il se voit décerné le prix Latsis EPFL 1996 pour ses études par microscopie à effet tunnel de processus atomiques déterminants la croissance cristalline de couches minces. En 1998 il obtient son habilitation (venia legendi) en Physique et est nommé Maître d'enseignement et de recherche (MER) en nanophysique à l'EPFL. La même année il recoit une offre de Professeur Ordinaire (C4) de l'Université Philipps de Marburg. Début 1999 il réfuse cette offre et accepte un poste de Professeur Extraordinaire à l'EPFL et s'installe au sein de l'Institut de la Physique des Nanostructures. Il est nommé Professeur Ordinaire en 2005. Sa recherche porte sur les propriétés physiques (en particulier le magnétisme et la structure électronique) de nouvelles formes de la matière condensée comme des nanostructures et des couches ultra-minces. Il s'intéresse également à la catalyse hétérogène sur des systèmes inspirés dans leur composition et taille par celle des sites actives dans les enzymes en biologie. Il enseigne la Physique Générale pour ingénieurs, la Physique des matériaux solides pour physiciens, les méthodes expérimentales pour physiciens, ainsi que la Physique des surfaces, interfaces et nanostrcutures à l'école doctorale.
Roberto CastelloRoberto Castello is a senior scientist and group leader at the EPFL Laboratory of Solar Energy and Building Physics. Physicist by training, he has extensive experience in collecting, classifying and interpreting large datasets using advanced data mining techniques and statistical methods. He received his MSc (2007) in Particle Physics and PhD (2010) in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Torino. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Belgian National Research Fund (2011-2014) and at the CERN Experimental Physics Department (2015-2017) as a research fellow and data scientist. He is primary author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and he presented at major international conferences in the high energy physics domain.
In 2018 he joined the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO-PB) to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energy. His main research interests are: spatio-temporal modeling of renewable energy potential, energy consumption forecasting techniques, anomaly detection, and computer vision techniques for automated classification in the built environment.
He leads the group of Urban Data Mining, Intelligence and Simulation at LESO-PB and he is a member of the NRP75 Big Data project (HyEnergy) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Swiss Competence Centre for Energy Research (SCCER) and deputy leader of the working group on Leveraging Ubiquitous Energy Data. He has served as a scientific committee member, workshop organizer and speaker at international conferences (ICAE 2020, Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 and 2020, CISBAT 2019 and 2021 and SDS2020).
Since 2017 he is member of the Geneva 2030 Ecosystem network, promoting the United Nations agenda towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).