Our Academic Committee

Prof. Katrin Beyer

Katrin Beyer studied civil engineering at ETH Zurich, where she obtained a diploma with distinction in 2001. She then worked for two years for the ARUP consulting firm in London on projects related to structural dynamics, impacts and seismic analysis. In 2003, she enrolled at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS) in Pavia, Italy, earning a Master’s degree in earthquake engineering, followed by a PhD from the University of Pavia in 2007. She then returned to ETH Zurich to work as a post-doctoral researcher.

In 2010, Beyer joined EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) as a tenure-track assistant professor of civil engineering. She founded the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics Laboratory (EESD), which studies the seismic behavior of unreinforced masonry structures with a particular focus on historical structures that were not designed for seismic loads. Her research group uses large-scale experimental testing and numerical methods to advance the understanding of the seismic behavior of such structures. Beyer was promoted to associate professor in 2017. She is a member of the executive committee of the European Association for Earthquake Engineering and a co-founder of the startup SwissInspect. Beyer chaired EPFL’s Open Science Strategic Committee from 2017 to 2021 and the ETH Domain’s Open Research Data (ORD) working group in 2020 and 2021. This working group authored a white paper on ORD in the ETH Domain and initiated a CHF 15 million program to implement the paper’s recommendations. Beyer served as ENAC’s associate dean for open science and digitalization from 2020 to 2023, and in late 2023 was appointed dean of ENAC for a four-year term starting on 1 January 2024.

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Prof. Kathryn Hess Bellwald

Kathryn Hess Bellwald received her PhD from MIT in 1989 and held positions at the universities of Stockholm, Nice, and Toronto before moving to the EPFL. Her research focuses on algebraic topology and its applications, primarily in the life sciences, but also in materials science.  She has published extensively on topics in pure algebraic topology including homotopy theory, operad theory, and algebraic K-theory.

On the applied side, she has elaborated methods based on topological data analysis for high-throughput screening of nanoporous crystalline materials, classification and synthesis of neuron morphologies, and classification of neuronal network dynamics.  She has also developed and applied innovative topological approaches to network theory, leading to a powerful, parameter-free mathematical framework relating the activity of a neural network to its underlying structure, both locally and globally.

She has won several teaching prizes at EPFL, including the Crédit Suisse teaching prize in 2011 and the Polysphère d'Or in 2013. In 2016 she was elected to Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a distinguished speaker of the European Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2021 she gave an invited Public Lecture at the European Congress of Mathematicians. She was awarded the Chaire de la Vallée Poussin by the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve in 2023 and was named a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2024.

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Prof. Wendy Queen

Prof. Wendy L. Queen obtained her PhD in chemistry from Clemson University in August of 2009. Afterwards, she was awarded a fellowship from the National Research Council to study neutron scattering at the NIST Center for Neutron Research. Here, she chose to focus her work on elucidating small molecule interactions on the internal surface of porous materials, such as metal-organic frameworks and zeolites. 

In 2012,she was appointed a project scientist position at the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley California where she helped launch a new user program focused on the synthesis and characterization of porous adsorbents. In 2015,she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL, and in 2022 she was promoted to Associate Professor. Her research is focused on the synthesis and characterization of novel porous adsorbents, such as metal-organic frameworks, that are of interest in a number of applications such as gas and liquid separations. In 2018, she won Merck’s 350 Innovation Challenge, in 2020, she was named one of C&E News “Talented 12”, an award which highlights “a dozen young rising stars who are using chemical know-how to change the world”, and in 2022 she won the Agora Optimus Prize from the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is also the President of the EPFL-Valais Campus Committee and the Academic Chair of the EPFL Energy Center.

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Prof. Véronique Michaud

Véronique Michaud is currently Associate Professor, head of the Laboratory for Processing of Advanced Composites at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. She graduated in 1987 from Ecole des Mines in Paris with an engineering degree, in 1991 from MIT with a PhD in Materials Engineering, and obtained a Research Habilitation from INPG in France in 1994.

After a post-doctoral research stay at MIT, she spent 3 years at Ecole Centrale in Paris for teaching and research in the Laboratory for Materials, Structures and Soils Mechanics, before joining EPFL in 1997. Her fields of research address fundamental aspects of composite materials processing, often including economic and environmental aspects to lower the overall product footprint, as well as the development of smart materials and structures including self-healing, shape and vibration control and tailored damping. She is the author of more than 300 publications, of which about 150 in peer-reviewed journals, and several patents. She is also the co-founder of the start-up CompPair Technologies SA, which was created in 2020, served as Associate Dean for Education for the faculty of Engineering from 2017-2023 and has been  European Editor (Applied Manufacturing) for the journal Composites Part A since 2023.

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Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran

Jean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received his Electrical Engineering degree and his PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis.

Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and has now been a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a part-time position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam.

Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include:

Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.

Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.

Jean-Philippe’s fields of expertise are image analysis, computer vision, multimodal signal/image processing, pattern recognition and medical imaging.

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