Members of the International Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB)
Patrick Aebischer
Patrick Aebischer is the past-president of EPFL, a world class research University that he led from 2000 to 2016. He was trained as an MD (1980) and a Neuroscientist (1983) at the Universities of Geneva and Fribourg in Switzerland. From 1984 to 1992, he was a Faculty member at Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island, USA). In the fall of 1992, he returned to Switzerland as a Professor and Director of the Surgical Research Division and Gene Therapy Center at CHUV. Patrick Aebischer is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a member of the Swiss Academy of Medicine and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. Patrick Aebischer is the vice-chair of the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA). He is the founder of four biotechnology companies. He presently seats on the board of Nestlé, Logitech and Polypeptide Group. He is a senior partner of +ND Capital, a venture capital firm based both in Silicon Valley and Lausanne.
Bruce Kogut
Bruce Kogut obtained his PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 1983 he started his academic career at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. From 1993 to 1995 he was also Director of Wharton's Emerging Economies Programs, and from 1997 to 2000 Associate Dean for its Doctoral Programs. In 2003 he moved to INSEAD, where he held a Chair in Innovation, Business and Society. He was also Scientific Director at the EIASM in Brussels, and from 2005 to 2007 founding Director of Insead Social Entrepreneurship Program. Since 2007 back in the United States he is Sanford Bernstein Chaired Professor at the Columbia Business School. He has won several awards and has been published in leading sociology, management and economic journals. He has served as a member of several corporate, academic, and advisory boards in Europe, Russia, and Asia.
Roberta Ramponi
Prof of Experimental Physics at Politecnico di Milano.
From 2013 to 2022 she has been the Director of the CNR Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies. She has been the president of the European Optical Society (2006-2008), and of the International Commission of Optics (2017-2021), now being the past-president of the latter. Since 2010, she is a member of the Board of the Stakeholders of the European Technology Platform and Public Private Partnership Photonics21, being Vice-President since November 2023. Her research has covered a wide range of activities in the fields of Optics, Photonics and fs-Laser Micromachining. In particular she has developed innovative techniques for the fabrication of waveguides in nonlinear crystals, passive and active glasses and for the accurate characterization of such waveguides; moreover, she has studied the design and realization of all-optical devices for applications to optical communications and of microoptofluidic devices for sensing. At present she is working on the design and realization by femtosecond-laser direct writing of integrated optical chips for quantum information. In 2020 she received the OSA (now OPTICA) Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award, and she is Fellow of OPTICA and of the European Optical Society.
Yasuhiko Arakawa
Director of Institute for Nano Quantum Information Electronics at Tokyo University.
Yasuhiko Arakawa is a Specially-Appointed Professor and Director of Quantum Innovation Co-Creation Center, the Institute of Nano Quantum Information Elecetronics at the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1980 and immediltely apointed as an Assistant Professor of the University of Tokyo. Then, he was promited to Assocaite Professor in 1981 and became a full Professor in 1993. He was a Visiting Researcher at the California Institute of Technology from 1984 to 1986 and a Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich in 2010. He is a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He has been consistently engaged in research on quantum dot lasers, single photon sources, and related quantum dot photonics since he first proposed semiconductor quantum dots in 1982. He has authored 820 scietific journal papers and has given 530 invited presentations (incl. 92 plenary/keynote presenations ) at international confeneces. He received numerous awards, including IBM Science Awrad (1991), Leo Esaki Award (2004), IEEE/LEOS William Streifer Award (2004), Fujiwara Award, Prime Minister Award (2007), IEEE David Sarnoff Award, the Medal with Purple Ribbon (2009), C&C Prize (2010), Heinrich Welker Award, OSA Nick Holonyak Jr. Award (2011), the Japan Academy Prize (2017), IEEE Junichi Nishizawa Medal (2019), and URSI Balthasar Van der Pol Gold Meda (2023). In 2023, he was honored by the Japanese government as a Person of Cultural Merit.
Seeram Ramakrishna
Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, FREng, Everest Chair is a world-renowned scholar of cross-field at the National University of Singapore (NUS), which is ranked among the top ten universities in the world. He is named among the World’s Most Influential Minds (Thomson Reuters) and Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers since 2014. Highest professional distinctions include an elected Fellow | Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, China; Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), UK; Indian National Academy of Engineering, India; ASEAN Academy of Engineering & Technology; and Singapore Academy of Engineering. He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, and TGMP from Harvard University, USA. His academic leadership includes NUS’s Vice-President (Research Strategy); Dean of NUS Faculty of Engineering; Director of NUS Enterprise; Director of NUS Industry and Technology Relations Office; Director of NUS International Relations Office; Founding Director of NUS Bioengineering; Founding Co-Director of NUS Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Institute; and Founding Chairman of Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS). He founded the Global Engineering Deans Council. He is a member of Council | Advisory Board of IP Paris, France; Silesian University of Technology, Poland; SRM University-AP, India; Madan Bhandari University of Science and Technology, Nepal; Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Botswana; and IES Singapore. He received Long Service Medal- Pingat Bakti Setia during Singapore National Day Awards 2021.
Bernard Salanié
Samy Mnaymneh Professor of Economics at Columbia University.
Bernard graduated from the École Polytechnique in 1984 and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (Ensae) in 1986. He received a PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in 1992. From 1986 to 2005, Bernard Salanié worked for the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, notably as the director of Ensae then of the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics. He also taught at Ecole Polytechnique from 1994 to 2007. Bernard Salanié joined the Columbia University faculty in 2005. He has held visiting positions at the Toulouse School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. He has published widely in the field of microeconomic theory and applied econometrics; His current research focuses on insurance, methods for policy evaluation, and the economics of the family. He is also the author of three graduate textbooks. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2001, and of the International Association for Applied Econometrics in 2021.
Sonia Seneviratne
Sonia Seneviratne studied at the University of Lausanne (Biology) and at ETH Zurich (Environmental Physics). After her master thesis, performed in a research visit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998- 1999), she conducted her PhD thesis at ETH Zurich (1999-2002). She was then a visiting researcher at NASA/GSFC (2003-2004), initiated through a fellowship of the National Center for Competence Research in Climate (NCCR- Climate). In 2005, she returned as a senior scientist to ETH Zurich, where she was nominated assistant professor in 2007. She was nominated associate professor in 2013, and full professor in 2016. She is a Revelle Medal committee member. In 2013, she received the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union.
Carlo Sirtori
Professor; Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; Holder of the ENS-THALES Chair.
Carlo Sirtori received his PhD in physics from the University of Milan in 1990. The same year he started his research career at Bell Laboratories (NJ, USA) where he made the first demonstration of the “Quantum Cascade Laser” and some important contributions in the field of nonlinear optical properties of quantum structures. He joined Ecole normale supérieure (Paris, France) in 2018, as holder of the ENS-THALES Chair “Centre for Quantum Devices”. Since 2022, he is the head of the program Master on Quantum Engineering, a new Master for PSL, straddling ENS, the engineering schools (Mines, ESPCI), Chimie Paris, and the Observatoire de Paris. Carlo Sirtori is the author of more than 300 articles in peer reviewed journals and has given some 150 invited talks at international conferences. He has received several prestigious awards in science such as the Fresnel Prize (EPS), the Booker Gold Medal (URSI) and the “quantum devices award” (APS). Currently, he is the leader of a group of 20 researchers (among PhD students, post-docs and permanent staff) focusing on quantum devices. His main interests are in quantum physics, light-matter strong coupling and data transmission in the thermal infrared atmospheric transparency window, in line with the scientific program of the ENS-THALES Chair.
Boris Murmann
Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
From 2004-2023 he served as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. From 1994 to 1997, he was with Neutron Microelectronics, Hanau, Germany, where he developed low-power and smart-power ASICs. Since 2004, he has worked as a consultant with numerous Silicon Valley companies. Dr. Murmann’s research interests are in mixed-signal integrated circuit design, including sensor interfaces, A/D and D/A conversion, high-speed communication links, embedded machine learning (tinyML) as well as open-source chip design. He is a fellow of the IEEE and currently chairs the IEEE SSCS Technical Committee on the Open-Source Ecosystem. His accolades include the 2021 SIA-SRC University Researcher Award for lifetime research contributions to the U.S. semiconductor industry.
Prof. Yamuna Krishnan
Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago.
She has pioneered the interface between DNA nanotechnology and cell biology. Her lab has developed a versatile chemical imaging technology to quantitatively image second messengers in real time, in living cells and genetic model organisms. Using this technology, her lab is discovering new organellar channels and transporters. She is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Ono Pharma Breakthrough Science Award, the Infosys Prize for Physical Sciences, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in the Chemical Sciences and the Sun Pharma Foundation Award for Basic Medical Research.