Adrian Wägli, EPFL's new campus choreographer

Adrian Wägli has been the new face of the Vice Presidency for Operations (VPO) since 1 December 2025. He returned to EPFL some 17 years after graduating, leading a stellar career in the private sector in the meantime. His desktop – a virtual one, as he’s accustomed to flexible workspaces – has any number of files open at once, which he uses to manage construction sites, renovation work, security issues, operating procedures, logistics and more. The hectic days don’t bother Wägli, who’s hard-working and determined by nature. Nor do they prevent him from thinking further out: his goal is to make EPFL an even more sustainable and responsible School that will remain attractive for generations to come.

Wägli, who hails from Bern, initially planned to become a surveying engineer and knew exactly where he wanted to go to university. “As soon as I heard about EPFL and visited the Lausanne campus, I was hooked!” he says. “The opportunity to improve my French was also very important to me.” But as he progressed in his rural engineering classes, he lost interest in the field of surveying. “I saw that the surveying profession was changing, and I didn’t see myself administering a portfolio of rural structures and buildings,” says Wägli. “So I shifted my focus to navigation systems, and this emerging field became the topic of my PhD.” For his thesis, he applied his technical knowledge to sports and developed systems for analyzing athletes’ performance. Looking back on his research career, Wägli – himself a sports buff – compares his efforts to running a marathon. He remembers his time at EPFL – which was interrupted by an exchange program in Canada – as an exciting period that just became more interesting over time. It was here that he met interesting people and formed lasting friendships: “I even met my wife at a Christmas dinner for the rural engineering department!” he says.

There’s also a creative side to our work at the VPO, in that we help design modern, sustainable spaces that will still shine bright in 30 or even 50 years.

Wägli left the world of sports performance in 2009 and joined AWK, a management and technology consulting firm that became Eraneos in 2023. “While the issues we addressed at AWK were different, the approach to problem-solving, earning clients’ trust and managing projects was the same,” he says. Wägli played an active role in growing the company, which had the feel of a family business. Dealing with one challenge after the next, he gradually climbed the ranks to eventually become a managing partner. Today the firm operates around the world. “It’s an amazing firm where I met some really great people,” he says. But when Wägli, now in his 40s, received the job offer from EPFL, he decided it was time to start a new marathon. “I enjoy working hard and am very driven – when I met EPFL’s new management team and saw how much energy they have, I decided to go for it,” he says, adding that his heart began to race at the idea of being able to contribute to the School’s success in a new way.

At EPFL, the VPO is the backbone of the School, ensuring that all its campuses operate efficiently and are safe and secure, so that everyone can focus on teaching, research and innovation. Yet Wägli sees the VPO’s role as even broader. “We also have a duty to ensure that our campuses are attractive so that students and researchers visiting the School and seeing our environment fall in love immediately, just like I did,” he says. “There’s also a creative side to our work at the VPO, in that we help design modern, sustainable spaces that will still shine bright in 30 or even 50 years. That means we’ve got to plan for future needs as much as possible so that EPFL is poised to respond to tomorrow’s challenges in research and education. It’s an exciting prospect!”

Several challenges awaiting

In other words, the VPO works not only to put safety first across EPFL and fend off cyberattacks, but also to make sure people eat well – the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach! – and enjoy a vibrant campus life enabling them to form lasting ties. “Creating together” is one of Wägli’s core values, whether with the friends he’s made over the years, with his family or within the academic community. And to bring that value to life at EPFL, he draws on teams of experts. “Our employees are known for their good work – sometimes too good, in that their ideas can be too ambitious relative to the need that was initially identified,” he says. “In addition, some collaborative projects can be seen as problematic by certain users, which too often makes our employees feel that their work isn’t valued. I believe that enhanced dialogue with our internal clients can reverse this trend. Through constructive teamwork we can find solutions that work for our users and our School, and that are reasonable from a cost perspective.”

Among the other challenges awaiting Wägli, he points to the large IT programs that need to be completed, the future of digital sovereignty, and issues of transportation and sustainability. Not to mention the construction and renovation work to be carried out on campus buildings. EPFL has changed a lot in the past 20 years – the School is growing, but also aging. The earliest buildings need to be renovated while new ones are being built. “One big concern for us is to make sure all this construction work creates as little disruption as possible for our community.”

Regarding the possibility of a cyberattack, an accident or some other unforeseeable event on campus, Wägli is quick to reassure us. But he does see one looming threat to EPFL’s development: finances. “What are our priorities as a society?” he says. “For me it’s clear that EPFL is laying the foundation for our future, for the next generation and for the success of Switzerland’s economy.”