"You can play a very important role for humanity"

The Global Issues course, part of CDH’s Social and Human Sciences (SHS) program, is taken by all EPFL first-year bachelor students. Classes are available from six interdisciplinary tracks – health, climate, food, energy, communication and mobility – and as the final project, students work in teams and create posters about an issue. Of these posters, three are awarded top prizes and 12 special recognition, given during the Grand Témoin Global Issues ceremony at the beginning of the following semester.

An education in the humanities

This year’s ceremony, moderated by CDH Journalist Anne Laure Gannac, began with words of welcome from EPFL Vice President for Academic Affairs Jan Hesthaven, who highlighted the importance of a humanities education in an engineering and technical school by giving the example of the Covid vaccine rollout, where the technology and science were solid, but there was a lack of understanding of how to communicate it effectively to society.

“In order for you to have a difference and make an impact, you need to understand the world that you walk into,” Hesthaven told the Global Issues students. “Even the very best solutions we can think of are useless if they’re not implemented”

Béla Kapossy, the director of the SHS program and former director of the CDH, then took the stage to offer words of encouragement and reiterate the necessity of having a solid cultural understanding. “As scientists, and as citizens, you need to be able to communicate,” Kapossy said. “This requires understanding different institutional cultures and values.”

Kapossy then gave the award for 2022 Best Teacher of SHS to Florence Graezer Bideau and the 2022 SHS master’s award to Lukas van den Heuvel, Gabriele Furlan, and Medya Tekes Mizrakli for their project Lab on Top, where they recreated scientific experiments of the 18^th century scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure.

This was followed by three presentations from the best poster winters of the 2022 Global Issues Course: Les éoliennes aéroportées, un atout pour le système énergétique?;Les organes artificiels : fantasme ou innovation?; and La propagande 2.0 : votre ennemi! Each group gave an engaging presentation in front of their peers. Then Kapossy invited the members of all 12 poster teams that received special recognition to the stage to receive chocolate.

Linking engineering with humanitarianism

The highlight of the evening was the keynote speech by Robert Mardini, Director General of ICRC, who was introduced by Victor Pennacino, a master’s student in robotics and winner of the 2022 model UN contest. Given that the Grand Témoin 2023 took place just days after the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mardini’s experience at the ICRC, which provides humanitarian aid to victims of armed conflict, was especially relevant.

Along with his role at the ICRC, Mardini is an alumnus of EPFL with a master's degree in civil and hydraulic engineering. He told the attentive students that EPFL taught him not only technical skills, but analytic ones as well, and that it was where he first came into contact with ICRC and understood the link that engineering could have with humanitarianism.

“For me, EPFL is more than an engineering school,” Mardini said. “It is an excellent platform to help you contribute solutions to our world.”

During his talk, Mardini also referenced back to the three posters that had just been presented, discussing the role of disinformation in the crisis in Ukraine, the need for affordable and accessible prosthetics for victims of armed conflict, and wind energy as one potential solution to the climate crisis.

After his speech, Mardini answered student questions, even staying past the end of the event to do so. And he made sure that the 2000 gathered students understood that whatever their educational path, they have a part to play in helping to improve the world.

“You don’t need to be a humanitarian worker to work for humanitarian causes. Whatever path you choose, you can play a very important role for humanity,” Mardini said. “One piece of advice: be crazy, be courageous, defy the status quo, and try as much as possible.”