Matthias Gäumann, Gisou van der Goot and Jan Hesthaven © 2020 EPFL / Alain Herzog
The ETH Board has just approved three people whose names EPFL President Martin Vetterli put forward to head the School's new vice presidencies: Prof. Gisou van der Goot, Prof. Jan Hesthaven and Matthias Gäumann.
The new vice presidencies are part of Prof. Vetterli's initiative to streamline his management team for his second term as president of EPFL, which will run from 2021 to 2024. Responsibility for research and education will be merged into a new Vice Presidency for Academic Affairs (VPA) - along the lines of the provost model used at other international universities - while responsibility for operations, human resources and information systems will be combined in a new Vice Presidency for Operations (VPO). Prof. Vetterli has also decided to create a Vice Presidency for Responsible Transformation (VPT), which will address a number of campus-wide issues.
Prof. van der Goot will strengthen values such as diversity and sustainability across the School's campus as the head of the Vice Presidency for Responsible Transformation. Prof. Hesthaven will be in charge of education and research as the head of the Vice Presidency for Academic Affairs. And Matthias Gäumann, who has been serving as the acting head of operations, will run the Vice Presidency for Operations.
Gisou van der Goot trained as an engineer at Ecole Centrale Paris and then embarked on a research career with a PhD in molecular biophysics. In 2006, she left the University of Geneva to join EPFL as a professor of molecular and cellular microbiology. She's currently the dean of the School of Life Sciences. Jan Hesthaven holds a PhD in mathematical modeling from the Technical University of Denmark. After nearly two decades at Brown University, he joined EPFL in 2013 as a professor of computational mathematics and simulation science. He's currently the dean of the School of Basic Sciences. Matthias Gäumann holds a PhD in materials science from EPFL and an MBA from the Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne. Before joining EPFL in 2015 as Director of Research Affairs, he held various management positions in the private sector, both in the financial and innovation sectors.
