Teaching

Engineers at EPFL’s DESL lab, working in association with EPFL spin-off Swisspod, have built a Hyperloop test track on the Lausanne campus. They will use the loop – a large vacuum tube for ultra-high-speed travel – to test a linear induction motor. The research is being funded by an Innosuisse grant.

Each year at Eawag, around 160 Master’s and Bachelor’s students are supervised and often directly involved in research projects. Again and again, this collaboration – as well as Eawag’s flat hierarchies and interdisciplinary culture – leads to outstanding Master’s theses.

As part of the focus projects, mechanical and electrical engineering students have developed solutions for the challenges of the future. In teams, they spent two semesters developing new technical approaches for their respective projects. The “IGNIS” and “e-Sling” teams presented here are just two of this year’s many notable focus projects.

EPFL students have made a high-performance 3D printer that can print structures measuring just a few microns across.

Eawag’s practice-oriented courses (known as PEAK) provide training for professionals. Isabelle Schläppi of the PEAK Office looks back over a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two years after Elon Musk's last Hyperloop Pod Competition in California, Swissloop, a team of students from ETH Zurich, has joined forces with three other teams to launch the European Hyperloop Week. In mid-July, the Swissloop team will travel to Valencia with their latest pod developed at Empa and exchange ideas with researchers and industry representatives about a possible implementation of the Hyperloop concept.

This summer, students from ETH Zurich will test various technologies on the Limmat for the automatic removal of waste. The Autonomous River Cleanup project is starting with rivers to tackle the global problem of marine pollution.

This year Forbes 30 under 30 – Europe named doctoral candidate, Nicole Aegerter to its Manufacturing and Industry list for being the first to efficiently manufacture thermoplastic composites for large, high-volume structures. Her journey reveals how to survive the lows of becoming an inventor.

Next week, the first European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics will take place in Zurich. The competition, which will have around 160 participants from 43 countries, is being organised by ETH students, who also came up with the original idea and are the driving force behind the event.

The R2T2 Mars Mission is an educational project developed at EPFL for grade-school and high-school classes that use the Thymio robot. A total of 180 teams have signed on to the project, which is teaching the students a variety of new skills.

Throughout the summer, architectural works by first-year students at EPFL’s ALICE studio will be on display at four sites in Geneva Canton: Genthod, Aigues-Vertes, Vernier and Onex. Visitors will be able to view the students’ work through a series of events, all in compliance with public health and safety measures.

The Swiss Solar Boat is the first solar-powered boat designed entirely by EPFL students. Modeled after a Polynesian canoe, it will compete in the upcoming Monaco Solar & Energy Boat Challenge and, for the first time, have a pilot on bord.

This episode of the ETH Zurich podcast is all about astrophysics. The first Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier talks about his flights into space and astrophysicist Judit Szulágyi about her experiences at NASA.

Building a better future by creating supply chain excellence. That’s the goal of the Executive Master in Global Supply Chain Management program offered at EPFL by the International Institute for the Management of Logistics and Supply Chain. And the in-company projects performed by program participants show that their novel ideas could considerably reduce CO₂ and sulfur oxid emissions.

In the last episode of the Uncertainty-Series, we talk to Helga Nowotny and Eric Burns about why uncertainty in research is eminent but at the same time increases pressure on researchers regarding their position.