Rolex Learning Center / EPFL by Sanaa ©2010 Hisao Suzuki
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The CHF110 million Rolex Learning Center at EPFL in Lausanne opens officially Monday 22 February. The 21st century education center is notable for its waves of floors without stairs and ceilings seemingly without support columns. It has Swiss cheese-like holes in the roof for light and aeration. The building is quite simply extraordinary to behold, and time will tell if its innovative design is as functionally pleasing as architects of the Japanese firm Sanaa promise.
The center is more than just an unusual building visually and functionally: in keeping with the work of EPFL into materials and processes research, the Rolex Learning Center has been built using several new construction methods.
Students, faculty and visitors who enter the building Monday will find a center which acknowledges that traditional learning methods and materials have been replaced by group work, using interactive and digital tools.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A post-graduate teachers’ certification course in English will be offered starting in September 2010 in Geneva, the first of its kind in the area. The PGCE is a new programme created jointly by Durham University in Britain with the International School of Geneva (ISG), for people who want to teach in an international education context.
Twelve students will be selected by Durham, with input from the ISG, for the course which runs for an academic year.
Nations campus, ISG, in Geneva
Celebrating a new sports hall at La Chataigneraie, Founex, part of the ISG
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Nicholas Tate, director-general of the International School of Geneva (ISG), will retire in August 2011, the school’s governing foundation has announced. It has begun a search for his successor to head the world’s oldest and largest international school.
Cristian Emanuel Amuchastegui, first place, 2010 Prix de Lausanne dance competition (photo: ©2010, Jean-Bernard Sieber)
Click on images to view larger
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Cristian Emanuel Amuchastegui, age 18, won the top prize at the 2010 Prix de Lausanne dance competition. He is from Argentina and has been studying at the Houston Ballet’s Ben Stevenson Academy in Texas, USA.
Amuchastegui also won the coveted prize as the audience’s favourite, selected with a poll taken during the final performances.
His prize is a year at the dance school of his choice, from among a host of top companies that are partners of the Prix de Lausanne.
The other top winners
Dancers who place in the top six spots, including the best contemporary dance winner, all receive scholarships at top partner schools/dance companies:
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Prix de Lausanne opened in Lausanne Tuesday evening with an announcement that tickets for the final selection performance Sunday are sold out.
The international dance competition, which has grown in stature in recent years but also in popularity as a hometown event, began with its usual flourish. Eighty-one handsome young dancers, ages 15-18, from 20 countries were selected from a record 226 applicants from 36 countries.
They are surrounded for the week by nervous tension, excitement and a crowd of enthusiastic followers. Given hometown crowds who can’t be in Lausanne for the competition, the Prix de Lausanne blog and particularly the collection of videoblogs are already proving popular.
This is the first year that more boys than girls have been selected. Japan has the largest single contingent, 16 students, with China following with 14 students.
Several of the selections are open to the public, for CHF10 (children 7-15 free) and CHF20 for Saturday’s events. The finals can be watched live (streamed) Sunday starting at 15:00.
Endocrinologist finds key to predicting impact of stress on stroke, pneumonia patients
Dr Mirjam Christ-Crain, 2009 Latsis Prize winner
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – One of Switzerland’s most prestigious scientific awards, the Latsis Prize, was awarded to Dr Mirjam Christ-Crain in Bern 14 January. The award, worth CH100,000 is given annually to Switzerland’s most outstanding young researcher, selected by a panel of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The winner must be under the age of 40.
Christ-Crain is head of endocrinology at the Basel University Hospital. She was given the prize for her work in discovering that measuring stress hormones levels, such as cortisol, in a pneumonia or stroke patient’s blood can provide doctors with information that allows them to make treatment decisions. Both illnesses can either remain benign or turn deadly, but there are few clinical clues for doctors to make a prognosis and treat the patient accordingly.
Geneva Writers' Conference
Lift 2009
Update 7 January 06:00 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva’s winter and spring schedule of conferences which are open to the public is getting underway, and it includes two favourites with the international population: the February Geneva Writers Workshop and Lift10, which moves from its previous February dates to May this year.
The Geneva Writers’ Conference, 5-7 February 2010 at Webster University, had only 10 places left, out of 180, by 6 January.
Paris, France (GenevaLunch) - France is reacting to a pre-Christmas letter distributed by its famed grandes écoles, which turn out the majority of the country’s top managers and politicians. The group says it will not follow President Nicolas Sarkozy’s order to accept a large number of lower-income students. The universities have long been criticized by some of the public for catering to the elite. They have been told that 30 percent of their students should come from less privileged groups, but the universities argue that the tough entrance examinations do not discriminate and are therefore fair. Accepting quotas for poorer students will lower standards, they argue.
Sarkozy himself is the rare political leader in France who is not a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration and he famously failed his examinations at Science Po, the political sciences university which now provides his model for finding gifted students in poorer areas.
Links to other sites: Figaro (Fre), Le Monde (Fre), Times, UK
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Philippe Gillet, director of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research cabinet becomes EPFL’s vice-president for education and research 1 April 2010. He replaces Giorgio Margaritondo, who has held the post for six years and who will return to teaching and research at the polytechnic institute.
Gillet, 51 and a native of Strasbourg, France, is a graduate of the Normale supérieure de Paris (Ulm), 1979, with a doctorate in geophysics. His specialties are the formation of mountain chains, the Alps in particular, and extreme pressure and temperature conditions found within planets. He was named director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Lyon in 2003, and in 2007 he became the director of the cabinet of Valerie Pecresse, French minister of Higher Education and Research. He has been involvd in the ministry’s reforms, including university autonomy, research and the elaboration of a national strategy for research and innovation.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The number of students coming to Geneva as part of Kent State’s overseas study programme will soon climb sharply. Kent State is an Ohio-based US university. The programme’s business and international relations courses in Geneva have long had waiting lists, but the John Knox Center in Grand-Saconnex which has housed the students, has only 22 beds. The programme will move at an unannounced date to the seven-storey Hotel Rousseau in the centre of Geneva, which Kent State will rent from a Boston development group.
Students regularly visit EPFL in Lausanne, but more boys than girls opt to go
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Only 15 percent of women in Switzerland are active in information technology, and only five percent of Swiss engineers are women. This brainpower deficit is addressed in Geneva for the first time by a leading US organization in the field, in a day of workshops in English and French for girls aged 11-15 and their parents. The workshops will be held at the International School of Geneva 14 November.
Expanding your horizons (EYH) chose Geneva, Switzerland to organize its first series of workshops in Europe. It regularly runs about 90 conferences a year in Asia and the USA to introduce girls to the sciences.
Participating girls choose workshops led by women who are recognized in their fields, says Jennifer Kealy, EYH Geneva conference chairwoman. The same subjects in school may be dry, but the workshops try to give young women a taste for the uses to which science and mathematics can be put in an environment that is dynamic and fun.
Bern and Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva’s Graduate Institute has been officially recognized as an institution of higher learning at the university level, according to the federal state secretariat for education and research (SER). The recognition means that the institute can receive federal subsidies for higher education, and the diplomas granted are officially recognized.
Swisscube, EPFL, 10cm2 and 83 grams
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Switzerland’s first-ever satellite has begun transmitting from space after its successful launch at 08:22 from India’s Sriharikota space station. The 833-gram, 10 cubic centimetre satellite began sending signals at 09:37. It is equipped with a telescope to allow staff and students to study airglow, described by the university as ” a luminescent phenomenon in the planetary atmosphere caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere and chemiluminescence caused mainly by oxygen and nitrogen reacting with hydroxyl ions at heights of a few hundred kilometers.”
The satellite was built by the EPFL in Lausanne as an educational project, with several government offices and companies as partners.
Peter Chen, Zurich polytechnic institute (©ETH 2009)
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Peter Chen, head of research at Switzerland’s EPFZ (ETHZ in German) polytechnic institute in Zurich, has resigned effective the end of September, the university has announced. “There are suspicions that scientific data may have been falsified in two publications and a doctoral thesis in 1999 and 2000,” the EPFZ press release says, noting that Chen, a full professor of physical-organic chemistry since 1994, who was the research group leader at the time, called for an investigation. The five-person team has concluded that results were indeed falsified. The research was in the field of basic chemistry.
It is not clear who was responsible for the falsifications, the university states, but “nevertheless, out of respect for ETH Zurich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as vice-president.”
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – EPFL’s miniature “SwissCube” satellite cube, originally a student project developed with other universities, including Neuchatel, will become Switzerland’s first launched satellite Wednesday 23 September, when it leaves the Indian Sriharikota space station. The launch is scheduled for 08:34 Swiss time and EPFL is planning a live viewing session open to students and faculty, followed by a celebration. SpaceCube is a mere 1,000 cm3 in size and is designed to photograph airglow phenomena.
Life Sciences, EPFL, Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The EPFL, one of Switzerland’s two federal polytechnic institutes (the other is in Zurich, EPZ), has just been awarded eight European Research Council starting grants for young researchers, worth CHF2.2 million each. For the second year in a row the university has been awarded more grants than any other school, including Cambridge and Oxford in the UK: in 2008 the ERC awarded advanced grants to older researches and the EPFL was awarded 11 grants of CHF3.7m each.
To Facebook or not? That is the question in Payerne
Payerne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Several students of the Gymnase Intercantonal de la Broye (GYB), a secondary school in canton Vaud, thought when school re-opened last week that they had lost access to Facebook and Messenger while in school. Online chatting and access to social platforms is still alive and well for the 900 students at GYB, the principal says.
According to school principal Thierry Maire, the bans, reported 1 September by some Swiss media, is not quite what the school is implementing.
First day back at St Jean Elementary (Photo Jared Bloch)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The kids are back: more than 30,000 students headed back to 90 elementary schools in canton Geneva Monday 24 August. Road safety around schools was high on some parents’ list of concerns.
According to Charles Beer, president of the cantonal council, this school year will be “marked by changes such as the designation of school principals, school councils and additional help for students who need it.”
Among those headed back to school today were the students at St Jean Elementary where young children and parents were witness to a serious accident during the end-of-year party in June. Two children were struck by a car while crossing the street in front of the school.
Both children, a 3-year-old boy and his teenage sister, have recovered, but the accident was clearly still on the minds of parents who were discussing traffic controls for the street as students arrived for the first day of classes.
Lausanne 2009 - down to Earth and back to the books soon
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Canton Bern has decided to coordinate school vacations so they will in future be the same for children in German-speaking and French-speaking communes: this week the German-speakers started back to school and next week the French-speakers return. The decision about school holidays has until now been the perogative of the communes, rather than the canton. The cantonal education minister says the request for change comes from parents, who sometimes have children in more than one commune and who can’t coordinate family vacations.
That still leaves the problem of coordinating two-canton vacations for families with children in Geneva and Vaud, for example, particularly if they have children in private schools, where residence is less of an issue but cantonal public school calendars are sometimes observed.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mathematicians at EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute, used a cluster of more than 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles to spend six months solving an encryption problem, breaking a previous record set in 2002. The laboratory for cryptologic algorithms cracked a 112-bit encryption based on elliptical curves. The significance of the work is that it “may serve to boost our confidence in the strength of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC),” say the authors, led Joppe Bos and Marcelo Kaihara. Encryption is widely used in banking and other industries for security. The encryption industry struggles to stay ahead of code-cracking hackers, who are using increasingly sophisticated methods and calculators.
A 160-bit elliptical curve standard is scheduled to be phased out by the industry in 2010, but the EPFL calculation shows that “for the next decade no regular user needs to be overly concerned about the security of 160-bit ECC.”
Daniel Borel, Logitech, at the groundbreaking for EPFL's Innovation House (image: ©Herzog, 2009)
innovation houseLausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The groundbreaking ceremony was held Thursday 25 June for Innovation House, a group of five new buildings at EPFL, the Lausanne federal polytechnic institute. It is the latest in a series of major building projects at EPFL designed to turn the school into a full university campus, joining the Rolex Learning Center and student and guest housing, buildings now under construction.
Photosynthesis at work, inspiring the Graetzel cells
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - A dramatic improvement in the energy efficiency of solar cells by adding a dye that is sensitive to the blue and green wavelengths of the spectrum was announced by researchers at Lausanne’s EPFL and Stanford University in California, USA. Graetzel cells, invented by EPFL scientists Michael Graetzel and Brian O’Regan in the 1990s, generate an electric current when light stimulates a dye. In today’s cells the dye is sensitive only to the lower-energy red range of the spectrum. By adding a second dye, perylene, which is sensitive to blues and greens and transfers its energy to the red-sensitive phthalocyanines, the solar cell’s range sensitivity is broadened, allowing it to make better use of the light it absorbs. The research is published in the June 2009 issue of Nature Photonics.
Neuchatel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The combination of a larger student population in coming years and a steep rise in the number of teachers reaching retirement age could well lead to a shortage of teachers in Switzerland, the 2008 Education Statistics published by the federal statistics office indicates. Hardest hit are likely to be primary schools, where 45 percent more teachers will be retiring between now and 2018. Secondary schools will see a 20-25 percent increase in retirements.
Foreign students make up 44% of specialized education classes
And 23% call themselves Swiss (image: Nick Zeller)
Founex, Vaud, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Graduation day at the La Chataigneraie campus of the International School of Geneva offered a surprise Friday 30 May, when the nationalities of the students were announced: Swiss topped the list with 31 of the 133 students, followed by British with 26. Sweden and the US each had seven in the graduating class and there were six Canadians.
The students were asked to record their nationality and where they were planning to go next academic year. This was the first year that dual- and multi-nationality students were asked to select which nationality they wished to be recorded, and the result was a boost in Swiss students listed.
International School of Geneva, Switzerland, Nations campus (click on image to view larger)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The International School of Geneva has been given a green light by the canton to proceed with construction of a new sports hall and a five-storey building that will provide 14 additional classrooms and an administrative centre at the Nations campus in Grand-Saconnex.
