As part of the events surrounding International Women's Rights Day 2023, EPFL will be hosting the STEM passion exhibition on a European tour. STEM Passion consists of multimedia portraits of women scientists from around the world.
For the occasion, this gallery has been enriched with seven new images of women professors at EPFL, one per school and college.
Prof. dr. Maryna Viazovska
The Rolex learning Center - EPFL - Lausanne, 2022.
Maryna Viazovska is a full professor of Mathematics and holds the Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics in the School of Basic Sciences of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She is a Ukrainian mathematician, born in Kyiv.
In 2022, she has been awarded a Fields Medal, the highest honor for a mathematician, for solving a long standing packing problem. She solved the problem of how to pack spheres in the most efficient way in a space with eight and twenty-four dimensions. At only 37 years old, she is the second woman in history to earn this prestigious award, often considered as the Nobel Price for Mathematics.
She received many prestigious distinctions for her remarkable achievements and mathematical breakthrough results, including the 2018 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize. She was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2021 and was appointed Senior Scholar at the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2022.
”YOU CAN DO IT.”
Prof. dr. Sarah Irene Brutton Kenderdine
EPFL Pavilions during the Cosmos Archeology – Explorations in Time and Space exhibition. Lausanne, 2022.
Sarah Kenderdine is a full professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she has built the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+), exploring the convergence of imaging technologies, immersive visualisation, digital aesthetics, and, cultural and scientific big data.
Since 2017, she has taken the first directorship and is the lead curator of EPFL Pavilions, an amplifier for art, science, and society, and a meeting place for all disciplines. She leads a team of software engineers, artists, and curators, at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums and has produced over 90 exhibitions. In 2020, she was named in the Museum Influencer List 2020 – The Power 10 by Blooloop and, Switzerland’s Top 100 Digital Shapers by Bilanz in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, she was appointed corresponding fellow of The British Academy. She is a regular keynote speaker worldwide.
BE TRANSDISCIPLINARY. HAVE INTEGRATIVE KNOWLEDGE. BE CURIOUS, COURAGEOUS, AND COLLABORATIVE TO SHINE BRIGHTLY.
Prof. dr. Tamar Kohn
AGORA Lombard Odier, Place Cosandey EPFL. Lausanne, 2022.
Tamar Kohn is an associate professor of Environmental Engineering in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and an adjunct researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).
As per March 10th, 2023, she has been promoted to full professor (read here).
Her main research focus lies in examining human viruses in natural and engineered systems with the goal of understanding the fate of viruses after they are excreted from their hosts and utilizing this information to protect public health. Some of the most important contributions of her work include her detailed studies on the mechanisms of action of different water disinfectants against viruses.
She is a member of the WHO expert panel on wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV2 and of the WHO advisory board for the international scheme to evaluate household water treatment technologies. She has served as the director of the EPFL doctoral program in Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2017.
“SCIENCE IS A SOCIAL JOB”
Prof. dr. Sabine Süsstrunk
Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan, Italy, 2022.
Sabine Süsstrunk is a full professor and Director of the Image and Visual Representation Laboratory in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne since 1999. From 2015-2020, she was also the first Director of the Digital Humanities Institute in the College of Humanities.
Her main research areas are computational photography and imaging, color image processing and computer vision, machine learning, and computational image quality and aesthetics.
Since 2021, she is the President of the Swiss Science Council.
She is also a Founding Member and Member of the Board of the EPFL-WISH, the Women in Science and Humanities Foundation since 2006 and served as President from 2014 to 2018. Among the many awards, she received the POLYSPHERE Best Teacher Award given by the EPFL students association AGEPOLY in 2020.
“JUST DON’T GIVE UP. LEARN HOW TO FAIL AND MOVE ON.
TAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS.”
Prof. dr. Aleksandra Radenovic
School of Engineering (STI) - EPFL. Lausanne, 2022.
Aleksandra Radenovic is a Swiss and Croatian biophysicist and a world leader in the field of nanotechnology. She is a full professor of Biological Engineering in the School of Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she leads the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology.
As an experimental physicist, her research focuses on the development and application of novel nanomaterials and experimental methods to study fundamental questions in molecular and cell biology. In particular, she is interested in single-molecule biophysics. One of her major innovations has been the fabrication of solid-state nanopores for single-molecule analysis, osmotic power generation, and DNA sequencing.
She filed six patents and was awarded highly competitive grants, including the Starting and Advanced Grant of the European Research Council, and the Swiss SSNF-ERC Consolidator Grant.
“DREAM, BE COURAGEOUS, AND BE WILLING TO TRY NEW IDEAS”
Prof. dr. Negar Kiyavash
Lausanne, 2022.
Negar Kiyavash is an associate professor and Chair of Business Analytics at the College of Management of Technology of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
Born in Iran, she graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in Teheran. She moved to the USA and earned her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Her research interests are in machine learning and statistical decisionn making, with particular emphasis on network inference problems such as causal inference, database and graph de-anonymization.
She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, one of the most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty and the Illinois College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
“DO WHAT EXCITES YOU”
Prof. dr. Kathryn Hess Bellwald
In her office at the School of Life Sciences, EPFL. Lausanne, 2022.
Kathryn Hess Bellwald is an American-born mathematician, known for her work on algebraic topology. She is Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Outreach and a full professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where she leads the Laboratory of Topology and Neuroscience.
Her research focuses on algebraic topology and its applications, primarily in the life sciences, neuroscience in particular, but also in materials science.
She is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a distinguished speaker of the European Mathematical Society. In 2021 she gave an invited Public Lecture at the European Congress of Mathematicians. She won several teaching prizes at EPFL and in 2008 she created the Euler course, an accelerated mathematics program, unique in Europe, for highly gifted children. She has four sons.
