École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Overview

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a public research university located in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was founded in 1853 as École Spéciale de Lausanne. It is one of the two member institutions of the elite Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain. EPFL is regarded as among the top universities in the world, with internationally recognized specializations in engineering and the natural sciences.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Key Statistics

The university comprises eight schools that are structured into various academic and research units. These include the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, School of Basic Sciences, School of Engineering, and the School of Life Sciences.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne's student population is approximately 11,449, with 5,736 undergraduates and 5,713 postgraduates. Around 48% of its enrollment are international students coming from 125 countries around the world. It employs 3,971 academic staff and 1,195 administrative staff.

The other École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne key statistics include its main campus at Dorigny in Écublens and several affiliated campuses such as EPFL Valais/Wallis in Sion, Campus Biotech in Geneva, Microcity in Neuchâtel, and the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Research

EPFL is one of the most advanced R&D institutions in the world and has hosted the UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development since 2007. It houses more than 350 laboratories and research groups that focus on transdisciplinary research in a broad range of fields such as advanced manufacturing, robotics, energy, biomedical engineering, personalised health, and data science. Its top fields of research are computer science, materials science, and physics.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne research outputs have been published in prestigious journals like Science, Nature Nanotechnology, and Energy and Environmental Science. Its researchers have attended major scholarly conferences such as NeurIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems, CVPR: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and ISIT: International Symposium on Information Theory.

The most cited École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne research publication is O'Regan and Grätzel’s (1991) “A low-cost, high-efficiency solar cell based on dye-sensitized colloidal TiO2 films.” This experimental report was featured in Nature and has been cited 33,718 times.

The university’s second most cited publication is Agostinelli et al.’s (2003) “Geant4—a simulation toolkit,” which appeared in the Nuclear Instruments & Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators Spectrometers Detectors and Associated Equipment and has received 33,405 citations

Moreover, the university’s third most cited publication is Giannozzi et al.’s (2009) “Quantum ESPRESSO: A modular and open-source software project for quantum simulations of materials,” which was published in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter and has received 19,042 citations to date.

In addition, EPFL has various cutting-edge initiatives like the Venice Time Machine, the Swiss Plasma Centre, and the Blue Brain Project. Some of its research centers and institutes include the Swiss Competence Center of Electrical Infrastructure, EPFL Space Center, and the Center for Applied Ecotoxicology.

The university also has several advanced facilities that both internal and outside research teams can use, such as the Biomolecular Screening Facility and the Molecular and Hybrid Materials Characterization Center. It also operates several P3 bio-hazard facilities, a Blue Gene/Q Supercomputer, a Tokamak Fusion reactor, and a nuclear reactor CROCUS.