News

Professor Sylvie Roke, head of the Laboratory for fundamental BioPhotonics (LBP) at EPFL’s School of Engineering, and professor Aleksandra Radenovic, head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology (LBEN), have been elected Fellow Member of the Optical Society (Optica) at the Society’s recent Board of Directors meeting

Ali H. Sayed, dean of the School of Engineering at EPFL, talks about engineering today and how it impacts our daily life. He also explains the diversity of engineering and how the school works on today’s World main challenges.

A Lausanne-Zurich research consortium has been awarded a 2.6 million francs Sinergia grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The grant will run over four years and involves four research groups from UNIL, EPFL and ETHZ. 

The Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS) program in EPFL’s College of Humanities (CDH) is pleased to announce that it will fund three research projects for the year 2022, all on the theme of responsible innovation.

Professors Silvestro Micera and Mario Paolone, from the School of Engineering, have been elevated IEEE Fellows 2022, a highly distinguished recognition.

We are proud to announce that Emissium and Consulto, have each been awarded a CHF 30,000 Ignition grant as part of EPFL’s Tech Launchpad - a leading incubator dedicated to supporting groundbreaking and innovative startups.

A team of EPFL engineers has discovered a strategy to shape living tissues like dough.

Fully operational for two weeks, the Dubochet Center for imaging was presented to the press on November 22. It promises considerable advances in biomedical research thanks to the precision of the images that its microscopes can obtain.

Originally created in 2011 at EPFL, there are now thousands of Thymio II robots rolling around in Swiss and French schools, as well as private homes. The technology offers a intuitive and fun introduction to programming. Starting today, EPFL will be holding a birthday hackathon in order to come up with new ideas for how Thymio can be used to teach the basic principles of artificial intelligence.

Giulia Meuli, PhD student at the School of Engineering's Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI) received the EDEE best Doctoral Thesis Award in Electrical Engineering, for her thesis « Program Compilation for Large-Scale Quantum Computers”.

Mirjana Dimitrievska, scientist at the Laboratory of Semiconductor Materials (LMSC) from School of Engineering, has received the prestigious Zonta award for her outstanding research on discovering and optimizing functional materials for solar cells and solid state battery applications.

Digital twins are computer-based models of an object or even a human organ, and the technology behind them is advancing at a rapid pace. EPFL will host a series of talks and seminars on this topic at its Digital Twin Days on 15 and 16 November. An ideal opportunity to learn more about the work EPFL researchers are doing in this pioneering field.

By combining two microscopy methods, EPFL researchers are able to see what is happening inside a cell and on its membrane simultaneously, giving unprecedented insight into the cellular processes that occur during infection, for example.

The application portal for the 2022 edition of the E³ EPFL Excellence in Engineering Summer Internship Program is now open. The program is organized by the School of Engineering of EPFL and offers an intensive research training opportunity to Bachelor and Master students from all around the world, with various scientific backgrounds.

EPFL’s School of Life Sciences launched in 2017 Catalyze4Life, an innovation encouragement program which supports early technologies and innovative projects with high potential in their path towards application, technology transfer and product development. Bart Deplancke, Associate Dean for Innovation, presents his vision of the project which enters in an expansion phase.

Olivier Martin, a professor at EPFL’s Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory, has won the best teacher award for the microengineering section. He spoke with us about his tried-and-true teaching methods.

Professor David Atienza, Head of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL’s School of Engineering, has been appointed Editor-in-Chief by the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) for their flagship publication, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), for the term 2022-2023.

In a study of transactions involving non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which represent digital works of art, EPFL scientists have found that the NFT market has much the same structure as interactions on social networks. Their pioneering study is the first of its kind.

EPFL and Microsoft Research scientists demonstrated ultrafast optical circuit switching using a chip-based soliton comb laser and a completely passive diffraction grating device. This particular architecture could enable an energy-efficient optical datacenter to meet enormous data bandwidth requirements in future.

A School of Engineering scientist has pinpointed the signs of brain activity that make up our brain fingerprint, which – like our regular fingerprint – is unique.

Based on the findings of researchers from School of Engineering and MPIB, recently published in ACS Nano, DNA-based nanomaterials are one step closer to applications in nanomedicine.

School of Engineering scientists have developed new controlled proteins and used to switch cellular activities on and off like a light bulb.

EPFL scientists have developed a topology-based method that forces microwave photons to travel along on way path, despite unprecedented levels of disorder and obstacles on their way. This discovery paves the way to a new generation of high-frequency circuits and extremely robust, compact communication devices.

Students of the Improgineering course have created an improvised performance around Rorhwerk, an ephemeral piece of art located at the Rolex Learning Center. Improgineering is a course developed by Prof. Simon Henein, from the School of Engineering, in the framework of the Human and Social Sciences (SHS) programme at EPFL, in cooperation with the Théâtre de l'Arsenic (Centre d'art scénique contemporain) in Lausanne. The course examines creative processes in science, engineering and the performing arts. The aim is to explore creativity in engineering and improvisation.

School of Engineering researchers have visualized nanoscale jumps in a ferroelectric’s polarization that are thought to play a key role in how well some ferroelectric devices function.

The professor and director of the Unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory in the School of Engineering has been appointed Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

The head of the Group for Ferroelectrics and Functional Oxides, School of Engineering, has been awarded the Humboldt Research award, IEEE Distinguished Service award and Best Teacher 2021 from the Materials Section.

Scientists at EPFL and Dartmouth College in the US have developed a system that can, for the first time, both pinpoint the exact location of a tumor and measure its depth. Their technology employs a high-tech camera developed at EPFL’s Advanced Quantum Architecture Laboratory.

Bruno Correia, previously Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Bioengineering.

Under an initiative by EPFL’s Center for Imaging, a team of engineers from EPFL and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have developed a plugin that makes it easier to incorporate artificial intelligence into image analysis for life-science research. The plugin, called deepImageJ, is described in a paper appearing today in Nature Methods.

A revolutionary implant developed at EPFL allows neuroscientists to activate or inhibit specific spinal-cord neurons by applying light at a specific wavelength. It will give researchers insight into how the nervous system works and the chance to develop new ways of treating neurological disorders.

Immersive virtual reality disrupts the child’s default coordination strategy, EPFL scientists show, something that should be taken into account when developing virtual reality rehabilitation protocols for children.

Urbio, an EPFL Valais Wallis spin-off who develops software to help energy providers plan the energy transition globally, has raised $2M in a pre-seed round.

A new assay developed by EPFL spin-off Nanolive opens up promising avenues of research for immuno-oncology treatments. It allows scientists to directly see and quantify how T cells find, bind, stress and kill cancer cells.

The project designed at ECAL for the GlobalNeonNat project led by EPFL's EssentialTech Center is garnering attention – and awards – at international design shows.

Two EPFL engineers have come up with a revolutionary new method for tackling plastic pollution by harnessing the inner workings of proteins. The result? A whole new way of looking at plastic recycling.

The review paper of Claudio Bruschini and Edoardo Charbon entitled “Single-photon avalanche diode imagers in biophotonics : review and outlook” has been selected as one of the Light: Science & Applications 20 top downloaded papers for the year 2020.

Christian Enz, director of the Integrated Circuits Laboratory at the School of Engineering, and Arnout Beckers, a PhD student, were awarded a prize for their research entitled Theoretical Limit of Low-Temperature Subthreshold Swing in Field-Effect Transistors 

EPFL scientists have developed a chemical method for targeting the effects of cancer-fighting immunotherapy drugs only to the tumor tissue, making the drugs less toxic to the rest of the human body.

Valérie Geneux, the journalist responsible for covering the news of the School of Engineering, was awarded the second "Best Young Journalist Prize" by the Centre de Formation au Journalisme et aux Médias

The successful deployment of solar power will depend on many factors, including how well grid operators are able to balance supply and demand in order to incorporate renewable energy into their low-voltage grids. An EPFL PhD thesis looks at how power utilities can promote flexibility to achieve that goal.

Professor Giovanni De Micheli, head of the Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI) at the School of Engineering, has been awarded with the 2021 IEEE TCCPS Technical Achievement Award "For sustained contributions to smart sensors, wearable and implanted electronics, and cyber-medical systems."

Two EPFL scientists – Georg Fantner, an associate professor, and Andrew Oates, the dean of the School of Life Sciences – recently published an article on how open science can be leveraged further in order to share discoveries and know-how with the scientific community.

EPFL engineers are pioneering an energy-saving technology that uses fiber optics to boost the performance of supercomputers.

As part of the Asclepios project, a simulated mission to the Moon run by EPFL students, six would-be astronauts spent over a week living on a mock lunar base. Their extraterrestrial habitat was actually right here on Earth – at the Grimsel Test Site, to be precise. Here we look back on an adventure that was (almost) out of this world.

Thanks to their swimming robot modeled after a lamprey, EPFL scientists may have discovered why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion. The finding could also help improve the performance of swimming robots used for search and rescue missions and for environmental monitoring.

A team of EPFL engineers, in association with local businesses and authorities, are testing novel algorithms for the deployment of greener EV fast-charging stations.

An EPFL scientist has found that brain fingerprints – or maps of the neural connections within our brain – can be used to detect a decline in cognitive ability. That’s because the fingerprints are harder to detect in people who already have mild cognitive impairment.

Engineers at EPFL’s DESL lab, working in association with EPFL spin-off Swisspod, have built a Hyperloop test track on the Lausanne campus. They will use the loop – a large vacuum tube for ultra-high-speed travel – to test a linear induction motor. The research is being funded by an Innosuisse grant.

Professor and Dean of the School of Engineering Ali H. Sayed, has been awarded the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing “for contributions to the theory and practice of adaptive signal processing”.