Prof. Christian Theiler
Assistant Professor Tenure Track at EPFL
Current research:
Detachment physics and turbulence characteristics in conventional and alternative divertor magnetic geometries Christian Theiler is an Assistant Professor Tenure Track at the EPFL specialising in Tokamak and Plasma Physics. He received his Master’s degree from the ETH in 2007 and his PhD from the EPFL in 2011. He then went on to join MIT. Having been granted an EUROfusion postdoctoral fellowship, he returned to the EPFL. In the past few years he has contributed to the understanding of the formation, propagation, and control of turbulent plasma structures, called blobs, and gained new insights on the structure of transport barriers in the plasma periphery in different high-confinement regimes.
His work won him an SNSF Eccellenza Grant in 2019 and the 2020 IAEA Nuclear Fusion Award.
Prof. David Tilley
Associate ProfessorUniversity of Zurich
Department of Chemistry
David Tilley was born in the United States in 1980. He attended Cartersville High School, in a small town north of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2002, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Georgia, with a minor in Spanish. He then headed west to continue his studies, and in 2007 received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Francis. At Berkeley, he pioneered a new transition metal-catalyzed method for site-selective modification of the tyrosine residues of proteins, with the aim of fabricating new biomaterials based on viral capsids.
Afterwards, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Erik Sorensen at Princeton University as a postdoctoral researcher (2007-2009) in order to further hone his synthetic skills, pursuing a total synthesis of the polycyclic anti-tubercular natural product hirsutellone B. At this stage, his burgeoning interest in the energy problem became so great that he chose to dive into a completely new field to learn how to generate hydrogen fuel from water. He received training in photoelectrochemistry as an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Michael Grätzel at the EPFL in Switzerland, working on water oxidation catalysis on hematite photoanodes. Following this postdoctoral fellowship, he served as Group Leader for the water splitting subgroup in the Grätzel laboratory from 2011-2014, while also continuing research on copper oxide photocathodes for hydrogen evolution.
He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Zurich in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020.
Prof. Evelina Trutnevyte
Associate Professor and Head of the Renewable Energy Systems group at the University of Geneva
Evelina Trutnevyte is an associate professor and head of the Renewable Energy Systems group at the University of Geneva. Evelina is an energy systems analyst and modeler, specializing in renewable energy, long-range energy projections, socio-technical analysis, and decision making under deep uncertainty and at science-society interface. She is an engineer by training and has completed her PhD studies at ETH Zurich, Chair of Natural and Social Science Interface.
Prof. Andreas Pautz
Full Professor, Laboratory of Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviour at EPFL
Prof. Dr. Andreas Pautz is head of the Nuclear Energy and Safety Division (NES) at the Paul Scherrer Institut, and professor of nuclear engineering at EPFL. He received a M.Sc. in theoretical physics from Manchester University in 1995, a master in physics/quantum optics from Hannover in 1997, and obtained a PhD in nuclear engineering from Technical University of Munich in 2000. After working for the state nuclear regulator at TÜV Nord, where he was responsible for the reactor physics oversight of two German 1300 MW nuclear power plants, he joined AREVA NP, Europe’s largest Nuclear Power Plant vendor, as group leader for the software development of AREVA’s next-generation reactor core simulator in 2003.
In 2007, he joined GRS (Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit), the German Federal expert organization for nuclear safety, as department head for reactor core behavior, and was promoted director of GRS’ reactor safety research division in 2010.
In 2012, he entered PSI and EPFL as full professor and lab head of the two Laboratories for Reactor Physics and System Behavior (LRS), and became head of PSI’s Nuclear Energy and Safety division in 2016. Andreas Pautz represents Switzerland in several high-level international nuclear safety panels at the OECD and the IAEA.
Dr. Testa Duccio
Scientist, SPC - International Installationsat EPFL
Dr. Testa Duccio is a senior scientist at EPFL in the Swiss Plasma centre. He obtained his Ph.D. in Plasma Physics at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, UK in 1998. After that, he joined the Plasma Science and Fusion centre at MIT as a Postdoc during 1998-2002.
Since 2002 he is Collaborateur Scientifique at the Centre de Recherche en Physiques des Plasmas (now Swiss Plasma Center), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, CH (permanent position from 1st January 2006) where he now mostly works on experimental plasma physics, with a specific focus on the interaction between fast ions, waves and turbulence, and on the operation of the TCV tokamak.
Dr. Remo Schäppi
Doctorate at D-MAVT Renewable Energy Carriers atETH Zürich