“I never thought I'd become an EPFL professor”

For some students, EPFL is a wake-up call: they may have been at the top of their class in high school, but their grades take a nosedive once they start university. Jeremy Luterbacher’s experience, however, was just the opposite: he suddenly got really good grades. “At first I was a little intimidated by studying at EPFL, so I worked like crazy!” he says.

He also got into the habit of setting his sights high. “I knew I wanted to pursue a chemistry degree after high school,” he says. “But if someone had told me that I’d eventually become an EPFL professor, I wouldn’t have believed them!” Today the head of EPFL’s Laboratory of Sustainable and Catalytic Processing, Luterbacher points out that “competition is fierce” in academic circles.

From ancient Greek to chemistry

From the outside, it would seem that Luterbacher’s career path was an obvious choice, as both of his parents were university professors. The young boy was indeed influenced by their field of interest – classical literature – as he opted for the Latin and Greek track at his junior high school in Gland. When he reached high school, which he attended in Nyon, he switched to the science track with a focus on biology and chemistry. “But I continued to study Latin,” he says.

Thanks largely to a “talented and engaging” teacher, Luterbacher developed a keen interest in chemistry – a subject that also came easily to him. “One thing that really helped me was the fact that I tend to visualize concepts in my head,” he says. “If you turn a chemistry problem into a cartoon, then it often becomes easier to understand and then solve.”

A bright green award

Luterbacher enrolled at EPFL as a Bachelor’s student in 2002 and stayed on to obtain a Master’s degree in chemical engineering in 2007. He performed his Master’s research at MIT: “When the professor supervising me left MIT for Cornell, I followed him and completed my PhD on the transformation of biomass into fuel.” He then worked as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In 2014, Luterbacher – who holds US citizenship through his mother – dusted off his Swiss passport and headed back to Lausanne, joining EPFL as an associate professor. A year later he co-founded TreaTech, a cleantech firm developing waste treatment technology. A second startup, Bloom Biorenewables, which offers biomass-based alternatives to chemicals derived from fossil fuels, followed in 2017.

Just like his startups, Luterbacher’s research is oriented towards low-carbon, sustainable compounds with a reduced environmental impact. In recognition of these efforts, the Swiss Chemical Society awarded him the 2025 Green & Sustainable Chemistry Award for his pioneering work on the depolymerization of lignin – a key component of biomass.

A lobby versus a football stadium

Luterbacher, a passionate researcher, replies frankly when asked if teaching isn’t a lot to add to an already busy schedule: “It’s a challenge to find time to prepare my lectures on top of managing the research lab. But the stress melts away as soon as I stand in front of my students. Teaching is a great part of my day!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he starts the semester by telling students about the trick that helped him get through chemistry years ago: visualizing the reactions in your head. But that also requires a bit of skill. “Some chemical mechanisms can be tough to grasp by thinking about them only in terms of numbers,” says Luterbacher. “But if you picture the confinement effect, for example, as entering a lobby versus entering a football stadium, then the concept really comes to life.”

The art of concentration

So what are Luterbacher’s lectures like? “I enjoy combining traditional and modern teaching methods,” he says. For instance, he might give an entire chalkboard lecture based on a book students were assigned to read ahead of time. Or he might assign students a project or instruct them to work on their own.

Luterbacher readily draws on new technology to help with his teaching but is quick to point out its drawbacks. “The new tools available are perfect for the better students, as they let them push even further ahead,” he says. But those who have a harder time concentrating “can soon find themselves overwhelmed.” He jokes that “these students are better off locked up with me inside a classroom than at home with temptations like TikTok.” On a more serious note, he adds that “we really need to work on the attention span of today’s youth.”

Comfortable with risk-taking

Like many EPFL teachers in all sections, Luterbacher has noticed a genuine gap between students who are at ease with the material and students who tend to struggle. “Our role as professors is to be there for both of these groups: to help the weaker ones improve, and to help the better ones change the world.”

Change the world, really? “We shouldn’t underestimate the impact that some people can have on our society and planet, whether by chance or thanks to their talent,” says Luterbacher. “We should support our students and encourage their willingness to take risks, like at Stanford and MIT.” That said, Luterbacher notes that this “requires trust and being comfortable with risk-taking,” which “just isn’t in Swiss people’s DNA.”