Nine Research Prizes reward EPFL Researchers

Zoom on these awards and their 2023 prize-winners:

• ABB Award: created by the house Asea Brown Boveri Ltd., this prize rewards an original scientific work in the domains of energy, production, transport, distribution and the use of energy under all its forms or computing, automatic and telecommunications. This year, this prize was awarded to Laurie-Lou Senaud for her thesis “Electrical Losses Mitigation in Silicon Heterojunction Solar Cells”, which was supervised by Christophe Baliff of STI's photovoltaics and thin-films electronics (PV-lab).
• Chorafas Award: offered by the Foundation Dimitris. Chorafas since 2001, this prize aims at encouraging exceptional works in the domains of applied research. This year, this prize was granted to Agnieszka Chryplewicz for her research project “Therapeutic co-targeting strategies for efficacious immune attack and tumor response” and to Kevin Jablonka for his research project “Toward data-driven materials design: From atoms to pilot plants”.
• EPFL Doctorate Awards: established in 1993 to distinguish the works of doctorates of exceptional quality and arouse vocations of particularly qualified researchers, this prize rewards three candidates having written a remarkable thesis for its originality, the impact of the results and the presentation. This year, this prize was awarded to Mark Hanson for his thesis “A systematic CRISPR approach to understanding the role of Drosophila antimicrobial peptides in immunity in vivo” and to Arthur Jacot for his thesis “Theory of Deep Learning: Neural Tangent Kernel and Beyond.
• Gilbert Hausmann Awards: this prize rewards a PhD student having completed an EPFL PhD thesis in the field of mechanical engineering, electricity or physics. The prize-winning project should stand out through its excellence, particularly in terms of originality and the prospects which it opens. This year, the prize was awarded to Guillaume Pietrzyk for his thesis “Precision measurement of neutral charm meson mixing parameters”.
• IBM Research Award: sponsored by IBM Research GmbH Zurich Research Laboratory, rewards a doctoral thesis or a master project undertaken at the EPFL. It is aimed at promoting research in computational sciences and recognizes outstanding projects developing advanced modelling and simulation methods or their applications to important topics in diverse areas of science (physics, chemistry, and biology) and engineering. This year, the prize was awarded to Giulia Meuli of STI's Integrated Systems Laboratory (LSI) for her thesis “Program Compilation for Large-Scale Quantum Computers".
• Materials Science Award (previously Wasserman Award): this prize rewards either a Doctoral Thesis or a Post-doctoral Research, undertaken at the EPFL. It aims at distinguishing innovative and high-level research in the field of new materials. This year, the prize was awarded to Materials Science student Alvaro Charlet for his thesis "Mechanical reinforcement of hydrogels through physical crosslinks and double network granular architecture".

• University Latsis Prize: offered by the Foundation Latsis Internationale, a non-profit public institution created in 1975, this prize rewards a research work which makes an important contribution and an international innovation in the field of the sciences and of the technology. This year, this prize was awarded to Jean-Philippe Brantut for his research project “Quantum simulations with atoms and photons”.

These prizes have been awarded by the EPFL Research Awards Commission.

For more details, please visit our webpage.