Prof. Dr. Martin VETTERLI

President
EPFL Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne

Prof. Martin Vetterli completed an electrical engineering degree at ETH Zurich in 1981, a Master’s degree at Stanford University in 1982, and his PhD at EPFL in 1986. His next stop was Columbia University, where he taught as an assistant and then associate professor. He was appointed as a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Two years later, Prof. Vetterli returned to EPFL as a full professor. He served as EPFL’s vice president of international relations and then of institutional affairs from 2004 to 2011, and as dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012. He also taught at ETH Zurich and Stanford University.

In his research, Prof. Vetterli focuses on electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics. His work has earned him numerous national and international awards. He is also behind some fifty patents, which have led to several startups being spin-off from his laboratory such as Dartfish, Illusonic and Artmyn and to technology transfers through patent sales, for instance to Qualcomm and Rambus.

From 2013 to 2016, Prof. Vetterli was the president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). A fervent advocate of cross-disciplinary research, Prof. Vetterli founded the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) on Mobile Information and Communication Systems in 2001. This led to discoveries in wireless network capacity and to new applications, such as for the environment.