News

Digital technology is running up against its physical limits. One solution is to build more data centers – but that needs to go hand in hand with a reduction in their carbon footprint.

EPFL scientists have developed a method for changing the physical properties of 2D materials permanently using a nanometric tip. Their approach, which involves deforming the materials, paves the way to using these materials in electronic and optoelectronic devices.

Professor Hatice Altug, head of the Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory, and Professor Camille Sophie Brès, head of the Photonic Systems Laboratory, have been nominated Fellow Members of the Optical Society at the Society’s recent Board of Directors meeting.

Professor Mahsa Shoaran, leading the Integrated Neurotechnologies Laboratory of EPFL, has been awarded a prestigious grant from the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop a new implantable brain stimulation system that can measure and control oscillatory brain networks to treat severe psychiatric illness, especially mood and anxiety disorders.

Optical frequency combs can link frequencies in the microwave domain to high-purity laser emissions, yielding unprecedented precision in time-keeping and metrology. Now EPFL scientists and their colleagues have generated variable low-noise microwave signals by building variable microwave gears with two compact optical frequency combs.

David Atienza, professor at the School of Engineering and Head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL), has received with his co-authors the IEEE/ACM ICCAD Ten Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award for the scientific publication entitled « 3D-ICE: Fast compact transient thermal modeling for 3D-ICs with inter-tier liquid cooling »

Sylvie Roke, professor in bioengineering at EPFL, has just been elected by her peers as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). This is a rare distinction, that is awarded for her “seminal contributions to scattering and imaging technologies to enable pioneering studies of complex aqueous systems and their interfaces.”

Medtech startup company Rheon Medical, spun out of the EPFL's Laboratory of Hemodynamics and Cardiovascular Technology (Stergiopulos Lab), has won the annual Swiss Medtch Award for 2020, for a device poised to revolutionize the treatment of glaucoma.

The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of 2 professors at the School of Engineering.

Scientists at EPFL, ETH Zurich and Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital have developed an implantable technology that enabled the discovery of an interaction between sensory neurons and immune cells.

Researchers at EPFL have developed remote-controlled, mechanical microdevices that, when inserted into human tissue, can manipulate the fluid that surrounds them, collect cells or release drugs. This breakthrough offers numerous potential applications in the biomedical field, from diagnostics to therapy.

Xsensio, an EPFL spin-off, has just been awarded CHF 1.8 million in EU funding to adapt its Lab-on-Skin™ sensing patches so that they can detect when a viral illness like the flu or COVID-19 is about to get worse.

EPFL physicists propose a new path to detect infrared radiation with outstanding sensitivity, allowing detection of signals as low as that of a single quantum of light.

EPFL researchers have created a single chip that combines a transistor and micro-fluidic cooling system. Their research, which has been published in Nature, should help save energy and further shrink the size of electronic components.

EPFL scientists have developed a non-invasive technique for unraveling the complex dynamics generated by spinal cord circuits to unprecedented detail, a first in functional magnetic resonance imaging that may one day help diagnose spinal cord dysfunction or injury.

Using computer simulations powered by machine-learning algorithms EPFL scientists have made an important breakthrough in understanding how hydrogen behaves on Saturn and Jupiter. Their research has just been published in Nature.

Researchers from EPFL's Photonics Systems Lab have come up with a way of reconfiguring microwave photonic filters without the need for an external device. This paves the way for more compact, environmentally friendly filters that will be more practical and cheaper to use. Potential applications include detection and communications systems. The researchers' findings have recently been published in Nature Communications.

Professor Maartje Bastings, from the School of Engineering, was awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.

Mahsa Shoaran has joined EPFL’s School of Engineering as a tenure-track assistant professor. 

Thomas Bolton (from MIPLAB) has been awarded the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering (SSBE) Research Award 2020 for "his outstanding achievements during his thesis: Development and application of dynamic functional connectivity methods to elucidate the neural underpinnings of human behavior with functional magnetic resonance imaging".

Professor Maartje Bastings, Director of the Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory, received 1.5 million euros for an interdisciplinary project.

Summer series: A calling for research. Aleksandra Radenovic, who heads the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology in EPFL’s School of Engineering, spoke to us about her extraordinary life experience, which has made her into a researcher who values openness and close cooperation with her team.

EPFL spin-off SEED Biosciences has developed a pipetting robot that can dispense individual cells one by one. Their innovation allows for enhanced reliability and traceability, and can save life-science researchers time and money.

In a promising breakthrough for the future of communications, EPFL researchers have developed a technology that can amplify light in the latest hollow-core optical fibers.

By combining purpose-built materials and neural networks, researchers at EPFL's School of Engineering have shown that sound can be used in high-resolution imagery.

Professors Sebastian Maerkl, from the School of Engineering, and Sandrine Gerber, from the School of Basic Sciences, each received a grant for their coronavirus-related research project.

Engineers at EPFL and local startup Intuitive Therapeutics have developed software that can produce optimized surgical plans for Gamma Knife radiosurgery. Doctors at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) began using the software in July.

EPFL scientists have developed the first micro-structured fibers with a viscous metal inside – a perfect example of what cross-disciplinary teamwork can achieve.

Researchers at EPFL and Bar Ilan University have developed a new type of embedded memory that takes up half as much space as traditional memory – and uses less energy – to store a given amount of data. The technology is being marketed through a new spin-off called RAAAM.

Summer series – A calling for research. Maartje Bastings, the director of the Programmable Biomaterials Laboratory, has found the right balance between her passion for trail running, her DNA research and her family

Adding to the richness of virtual reality, EPFL researchers have created soft actuators that can simulate the feeling of touching a virtual object with your fingers. 

In the Medical Image Processing Lab, Dimitri Van De Ville and Thomas Bolton have studied the impact that computational imaging has on cognitive and clinical neuroscience by reviewing more than one hundred articles.

EPFL researchers have invented a way of automatically working out what data needs to be put into a complex system – such as a fiber optic network – in order to get the desired result. Their solution could prove especially useful in robotics, medicine and image projection.

Combining integrated photonics and MEMS technology, scientists from EPFL and Purdue University demonstrate monolithic piezoelectric control of integrated optical frequency combs with bulk acoustic waves. The technology opens up integrated ultrafast acousto-optic modulation for demanding applications.

Researchers at EPFL have shown that electromagnetic waves coupled to precisely engineered structures known as artificial ferromagnetic quasicrystals allow for more efficient information transmission and processing at the nanoscale. Their research also represents the first practical demonstration of Conway worms, a theoretical concept for the description of quasicrystals.

The Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has announced the appointment of 7 professors at EPFL, including 4 from the School of Engineering.

Christoph Merten recently joined EPFL’s School of Engineering (STI) as a professor in the Institute of Bioengineering.

A paper by Karim Shalash and Jürg Schiffmann from the School of Engineering has received the best paper award at the ASME Turbomachinery Technical Conferences and Exposition.

Professors David Atienza and Pascal Frossard, from the School of Engineering, have been awarded a grant from the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique.

Summer Series: Science as a vocation. Andreas Burg is the head of EPFL School of Engineering’s Telecommunication Circuits Laboratory (TCL). He’s a keen proponent of approximate computing, a disciplined approach that prizes “good enough” over perfection.

Professor Christoph Merten, from the School of Engineering, has been awarded a Sinergia 2020 grant from the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique.

The PhD student from The Integrated Circuits Laboratory (ICLAB) was awarded a prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) on medical measurements and applications.

EPFL researchers have developed a high-precision technology that enables them to carve nanometric patterns into two-dimensional materials.

Researchers at EPFL’s Advanced Quantum Architecture Laboratory and the Wision Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a technique for building crystal-clear images of moving subjects. The team will present its paper at the prestigious SIGGRAPH 2020 conference in August.

Professor Michaël Unser, from the School of Engineering’s Biomedical Imaging Laboratory, has been awarded one of the most prestigious annual award given by the IEEE Engineering in Biology and Medicine Society.

From 22 to 30 August, the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, is organizing a AI Super Hackathon.

EPFL’s Professors Aleksandra Radenovic and Paolo De Los Rios have been awarded a Sinergia grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Scientists at EPFL have developed robust and easy-to-implement multicolor super-resolution imaging. The approach is based on the simultaneous acquisition of two spectral channels followed by spectral cross-cumulant analysis and unmixing. They exploit fluorophore blinking and spectral crosstalk for the generation of additional color channels with super-resolved images.

The scientist of the Laboratory for Theory and Simulation of Materials has received an award from the Rodolphe and Renée Haenny Foundation.

While conducting experiments on a layered metal, EPFL researchers witnessed something very surprising. The unexpected electron behavior they discovered could open up possibilities in the field of quantum computing.