An EPFL student wins a scholarship from the Swiss Study Foundation
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Matteo Togninalli, a bioengineering student at EPFL, won one of two 20,000-franc scholarships awarded annually by the Swiss Study Foundation. He will use the money for his Master’s project, which he will do at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Each year, the Swiss Study Foundation awards two scholarships to top-notch students to pay for either studying or carrying out a research project abroad.
This year’s winners were Matteo Togninalli, an EPFL student, and Florian Berlinger, from ETH Zurich, who will do their Master’s projects at Stanford and Harvard, respectively.
Togninalli, born in 1992 in Ticino, earned his Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering at EPFL and is currently finishing up his Master’s coursework in bioengineering, also at EPFL. For his Master’s project he will look at biomedical technologies with a particular focus on the regenerative potential of muscle stem cells – which he studies using a 3D culture system – in the area of degenerative diseases. His aim is to gain insight into diseases like muscular dystrophies in order to come up with treatments.
Togninalli will use the Swiss Study Foundation scholarship to do his Master’s project at the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology, at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Florian Berlinger, who is from St. Gallen, will go to Harvard University to study the coordination of collective artificial intelligence in swarms of aquatic robots in collaboration with the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group.
The Swiss Study Foundation, which was created in 1991, is a private, non-profit foundation that rewards talented students from Swiss universities and specialized schools every year. The Foundation’s objective is to support students whose work will contribute to the sciences, the economy, culture or politics.