Principal investigators

Professor Athanasios Nenes joined EPFL in September 2018 as a full professor of environmental engineering, and at the same time opened the Laboratory of Atmospheric Processes and their Impacts (LAPI) at the school.
After obtaining a chemical engineering degree in his native city of Athens, Professor Nenes earned a Master’s degree in atmospheric chemistry from the University of Miami and a PhD in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was appointed assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 2002, and was promoted to full professor in 2011 – a position he held until coming to EPFL.

Professor Markus Ammann has been Group Leader of the Multiphase Chemistry Group at PSI since 1997 and Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich since 2014.

After his Degree in physical chemistry and solid state physics at ETH Zurich, Professor Ammann obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich with laboratory work on photoemission from inorganic salt aerosol particles, development of a field sensor for detecting ultrafine aerosol particles in volcanic gases.

Professor Lenny Winkel has been Head of the group Environmental Inorganic Geochemistry at Eawag and associate Professor at the Department of Environmental Systems Science of ETH Zurich since 2018.
Professor Winkel completed a Master’s in geology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2000 and obtained a PhD from ETH Zurich (Earth Science Department) in 2006. From 2006 to 2008 she worked as a postdoc at Eawag and from 2008 to 2011 she was an experienced researcher in the European Marie-​Curie network AquaTRAIN, working at the universities of Grenoble, France, Aberdeen, UK and Crete, Greece. Professor Winkel joined ETH Zurich and Eawag in 2011 as a SNSF-​funded non-​tenure-track assistant professor.

Professor Charlotte Grossiord has been Head of the research group Functional Plant Ecology at WSL and Director of the Plant Ecology Research Laboratory at EPFL since March 2020 (Joint Professorship).

After her PhD at Lorraine University and at INRAE Grand Est-Colmar, in France, Professor Grossiord did her postdoc at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA. She has been conducting research at WSL since 2018, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “Ambizione” funding program and was appointed tenure-track Assistant Professor at EPFL and WSL in September 2019.

Professor Johan Six has been Full Professor of Sustainable Agroecosystems at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich since March 2013.

Professor Six studied Soil Science and Tropical Agriculture at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and conducted his PhD research at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) of Colorado State University. After receiving his PhD in Soil Science in 1998, he remained as a Research Scientist at the NREL until 2002. In 2002 he took a position as professor at the University of California, Davis, CA.