Teaching

At the start of the 2020 fall semester, a group of EPFL students set up the EPFL Xplore association with the goal of building a rover from scratch. Their vehicle, named Argos, will compete in this weekend's European Rover Challenge – Europe's most prestigious competition dedicated to mobile robots. 

EPFL has recently brought an innovative heating plant online and will soon connect it to a large data center. The plant will help the Ecublens campus optimize how it generates and consumes energy, with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have demonstrated the positive effects of productive failure on learning outcomes. The success rate for one of ETH’s largest courses was increased by 20 percent.

Apprentices play a little-known but essential role in science made in Switzerland. Here, we take a look at young people who are being trained in the institutions in the ETH Domain.

Marion Höhener, 19, has completed her training as a physics laboratory assistant at Empa this summer. She wants to make research her career and is already looking towards higher education.

After finishing high school, Rohat Sihyürek joined PSI as an apprentice polymechanic. There, the 20-year-old manufactured high-precision parts that are essential for Switzerland's largest research facilities.

Trisha Stewart, 17, is one of around 170 young people doing an apprenticeship at ETH Zurich. She is currently involved in research into the immunology of yeast cells. The third-year biology laboratory assistant has also given online lectures on botany.

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.