Teaching

For more than 15 years, EPFL researchers have been exploring ways to improve training for apprentices. The findings are summarized in a recently published book and a website for teachers, and new educational technologies are currently being developed.

Olivier Lalancette, an EPFL Master’s student in architecture, has come up with some development proposals for the Brig-Visp-Naters conurbation. His suggestions, relatively modest in scope, could help these cities better withstand the droughts and heavy rainfall that are expected to intensify by 2050. Lalancette hopes his study will start a conversation about the region’s future.

The new Enhance Alliance of ten European technical universities aims to make it easier to study abroad. ETH Zurich officially joined the alliance today.

EPFL has joined the Laidlaw Foundation to offer its first-year Bachelor’s students a new program designed to develop a new generation of leaders working for a sustainable future.

EPFL’s first Mental Health Week will take place on campus from 21 to 25 November. We spoke to Kathryn Hess Bellwald, who heads the Task Force Mental Health & Well-Being, about this initiative and the strategy behind it.

The prize, awarded by the EPFL Women in Science and Humanities (WISH) Foundation, has been delivered at a ceremony at EPFL’s Rolex Learning Center on 7 November.

The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich has digitised over 50,000 artworks and made them freely accessible. Linda Schädler, Head of the Graphische Sammlung, explains in an interview why she hopes to do the same with the remaining 110,000.

The four-seater electric aircraft “e-Sling”, which was developed by ETH students, has taken flight for the first time. The student project has taken two years and a lot of dedication.

Today EPFL inaugurated its new heating plant, which has the capacity to heat and cool the Lausanne campus solely by drawing water from Lake Geneva and recovering excess heat from a connected data center. The ceremony was attended by local political leaders including Vassilis Venizelos, who is a Vaud Canton councilor and the head of the Canton’s department of youth, the environment and security.

ETH Zurich and UBS are launching a strategic partnership. Over a period of 10 years, UBS will invest up to CHF 20 million in two joint initiatives to promote entrepreneurship and innovation, and raise interest in STEM subjects. UBS will also make a donation of up to CHF 20 million to support the construction of a new ETH building on the Hönggerberg campus.

The Low-Tech Lab in Lausanne has been part of the Unipoly association of EPFL since 2021 and aims to popularize the low-tech approach already found in several other European universities. Its showcase project rebuiLT is one of EFPL’s interdisciplinary MAKE projects and seeks to reuse parts of a building being demolished to create a community pavilion in Ecublens.

Held every year on August 12, International Youth Day provides a platform for young people to focus on how they will develop innovative and entrepreneurial solutions for the future. Two EPFL summer programs are helping to do this in the field of computer and communication science.

Over the last six years, more than 160,000 people around the world have participated in online courses offered by Eawag, thus acquiring valuable knowledge about, for example, sanitation systems or municipal solid waste management.

Anna Kiesenhofer has a doctorate in mathematics and was doing research as a postdoc at EPFL on partial differential equations when she qualified for the cycling road race at the Olympic Games in Tokyo and won the gold medal in sensational fashion. She sees parallels between mathematics and cycling which were instrumental in her success.   

This weekend, students from ETH Zurich won the sustainability prize at the 18^th concrete canoe regatta in Brandenburg with their boat "TruchETH". The aspiring civil engineering impressed with an environmentally friendly boat for which they combined old clothes with concrete.