Michaël Thémans appointed Deputy Director of TraCE
Dr Michaël Thémans, who completed his PhD thesis in the Transport and Mobility laboratory in 2007, has been appointed Deputy Director of the Transportation Center @ EPFL, as of January 1st, 2010.
Michaël's role consists in assisting the Head of TraCE, Professor Michel Bierlaire, its Steering Committee and its Core Team in deploying the overall strategy for TraCE's future growth. His mission is threefold: percolate and highlight ongoing research activities in transportation at EPFL next to private companies and industries as well as public institutions and authorities, at the local, national and international levels; develop partnerships and research projects with these different actors, obtain financing to conduct new cutting-edge multi-disciplinary research projects in the field of transportation at EPFL.
An experienced applied mathematician with a strong expertise in the transportation field, Michaël gained his PhD. in Operations Research and Mathematical Modeling at EPFL 2007. His thesis, supervised by Professor Michel Bierlaire, was entitled Numerical Methods and Models Relevant to Transportation Applications.
Before being appointed at TraCE, Michaël had been working at Nestlé over more than 50 R&D projects. Among other things, he has developed innovation discrete choice models to predict consumer behaviour and disseminated these new methodologies for Nestlé makets worldwide. Previously he had been working at EPFL since 2002 as a research and teaching assistant, lecturing courses on Operations Research and Behavioral Modeling and working on several large-scale transportation-related research projects, in association with MIT and ETH Zurich namely, sponsored both by the Swiss Federal Office of Roads and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In parallel he also holds a position as lecturer at EFPL, teaching a master course in Numerical Optimization.