Prof. Martin Vetterli is president of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the ETH Zurich (ETHZ) in 1981, a master’s degree from Stanford University in 1982, and a PhD from EPFL in 1986. Prof. Vetterli taught at Columbia University as an assistant and then associate professor. He was subsequently named full professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to EPFL as a full professor at the age of 38. He has also taught at ETHZ and Stanford University
Prof. Vetterli has earned numerous national and international awards for his research in electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996. He is a fellow of both the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has published more than 170 articles and three reference works.
Prof. Vetterli’s work on the theory of wavelets, which are used in signal processing, is considered to be of major importance by his peers, and his areas of expertise, including image and video compression and self-organized communication systems, are central to the development of new information technologies. As the founding director of the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mobile Information and Communication Systems, he is a staunch advocate of transdisciplinary research.