Ingrid Le DucI am committed and passionate for furthering Academic Development as a profession that intersects with current educational standards and teachers real concerns. Being exposed to a variety of academic cultures I grew a particular interest in understanding learning and its behavior taking into consideration how learning may be influenced by external and societal factors. Studies: PhD in Social Psychology, London School of Economics, 2001. Thesis title: 'Social Representations of Human Rights: the case of the patrona-muchacha relationship'. A look inside the private life of women in Mexican middle-class urban households. Licenciatura in Psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, UNAM, 1995. Additional training: I am currently training as a systemic and strategic therapist at the Gregory Bateson Institute, the European representation of the Mental Research Institute located in Palo Alto, California. In 2004 I became an accredited Quality Management Evaluator of the European Foundation of Quality Management EFQM. Experience: Before joining EPFL in 2009, I worked at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) where I collaborated as a Quality Advisor for teachers and instructors. Teaching assistant at the Department of Social Psychology of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My first job in Educational Development was as part of a newly established Pedagogical Research Support for the Virtual Campus Project of the renowned Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM)at Mexico City (1996-1997). I volunteered for many causes, such as for the Indo-American Refugee and Migrant Organization (IRMO), in London and Amnesty International. Mandates: During my free-time I participate on trainings on scientific communication and teaching in Higher Education.
Alain WegmannAlain Wegmann joined EPFL in 1996. His interests are in techniques to better align business and IT. He developed, with his group and partners, the SEAM methods: SEAM for business (strategic thinking), SEAM for enterprise architecture (business/IT alignment) and SEAM for software (IT). The originality of SEAM is in the integration of generic systems thinking principles into discipline-specific methods. This integration has three benefits: (1) the possibility to relate the different disciplines (by having common systemic principles); (2) the capability to leverage on discipline-specific knowledge (by using the vocabulary and the heuristics of each discipline) and (3) to be more efficient in solving problems (by benefiting from the problem solving techniques developed in systems thinking). SEAM is currently applied in master courses and consulting. Consulting is done for start-ups developing their business and technology strategies and for large companies having service-oriented architecture projects.
Prior to joining EPFL, Alain Wegmann worked for 14 years with Logitech in software development/engineering management (Switzerland, Taiwan, US), manufacturing (Taiwan) and marketing (US). When he left Logitech, Alain Wegmann was engineering vice-president and marketing director for large accounts.