Sabine Süsstrunk appointed dean of IC School
Sabine Süsstrunk © 2025 EPFL/Alain Herzog - CC-BY-SA 4.0
Head of the Images and Visual Representation Laboratory, Professor Süsstrunk will take the helm of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in September.
Sabine Süsstrunk joined EPFL in 1999 and since 2014 has been head of the Images andVisual Representation Laboratory (IVRL). From 2015-2020, she was also the first Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) and Digital Humanities Section (SoDH), College of the Humanities (CdH).
She has a BS in Scientific Photography from ETH Zürich, an MS in Electronic Publishing from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, and a PhD on computing chromatic adaptation from the University of East Anglia in the UK.
Her main research areas are in computational photography, computer vision, generative AI and computational aesthetics. She received the IS&T/SPIE 2013 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award for her contributions to color imaging, computational photography, and image quality, and the 2018 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman, and the 2020 EPFL AGEPoly IC Polysphere Awards for excellence in teaching. Sabine is a Fellow of AIAA, ELLIS, IEEE and IS&T and regular member of SATW.
In 2020, Süsstrunk was appointed president of the Swiss Science Council (SSC), she also co-founded the WISH Foundation (Women in Science and Humanities), which promotes women in science, she is a Board Member of the SRG SSR (Swiss Broadcasting Corporation), and the Swiss Study Foundation, and she also co-founded and sits on the board of Largo Films.
Süsstrunk will take up her new position on 1 September 2025, replacing Rüdiger Urbanke, under whose leadership the IC School has become the second largest school at EPFL by enrolment since celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2022.
The school has introduced joint master's programs in Neuro-X and quantum science, boosted its international reputation, taken the lead on major Swiss-wide initiatives in AI and hired top professors.
The IC School has also consolidated its research activities in quantum computing and life science through ambitious cross-disciplinary projects while at the same time helping shape the public debate on artificial intelligence and cyber security.