Kay SeverinKay Severin was born in Germany in 1967. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 with a thesis in the group of Prof. W. Beck, University of Munich. Subsequently, he joined the group of Prof. M. R. Ghadiri as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1997, he started independent research projects ("Habilitation") at the Department of Chemistry, University of Munich. In 2001, he became assistant professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2009, he is full professor at the same institute.
Awards: Bayerischer Habilitations Förderpreis (1997), ADUC award of the year (2001), Heinz Maier-Leibnitz award of the DFG (2001), award of the Karl-Ziegler foundation (2001), Arnold Sommerfeld award of the Bavarian Academy of Science (2001), Werner Prize of The Swiss Chemical Society (2003), Otto Roelen Medal of the DECHEMA (2005), award for chemistry of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen (2007), Dalton Transactions European Lectureship (2008).
Paolo De Los RiosPaolo De Los Rios earned his master in Electronic Engineering at the Turin Institute of Technology (Politecnico di Torino) in May 1993. In November 1993 he moved to Trieste, Italy, to enter the PhD program in Theoretical Condensed Matter Theory at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) where he obtained the PhD degree in October 1996 for his work on the statistical physics of disordered systems. After a one year postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, in November 1997 he moved to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, to join the group of Prof. Yi-Cheng Zhang. There he has worked on various applications of statistical physics to complex systems. In September 2000 he has been appointed Assistant Professor in Statistical Physics of Living Matter and Complex Systems at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since April 2010 he is Associate Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
