Gabriel Aeppli - Biography#

Aeppli’s degrees are from MIT and include a BSc in Math. and Electrical Engineering, and MSc and PhD in El. Eng. A large fraction of his career was in industry, starting as a work-study student at IBM and after his PhD thesis moving to Bell Labs, where he built and staffed two in-house laboratories, one for examining time-resolved phenomena in ferroelectrics, and the second dedicated to magnetotransport measurements in solids. Simultaneously, he pioneered the exploitation of large accelerators for X-ray, muon, and neutron studies of condensed matter. In 1996 he became a Senior Research Scientist at the NEC laboratories in Princeton, where he founded a group performing scan probe microscopy, magnetic and electrical measurements, while continuing to use and develop accelerators not only for physics but also for applications such as combinatorial chemistry.

From late 2002, he was Quain Professor of Physics and founding director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology, a multidisciplinary research centre with a focus on simultaneous achievement of scientific excellence and commercialisation. Aeppli had responsibility for a £20M capital project resulting in a fully equipped facility in Bloomsbury, and then managed the LCN@UCL as a department with approximately 150 staff and an annual turnover of order £10M. In 2014 he became a Professor of Physics at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zürich and Lausanne, and the founding head of the Photon Science Division responsible for the exploitation of the Swiss Light Source synchrotron and SwissFEL, one of only five hard X-ray free electron lasers in the world, at the Paul Scherrer Institute.

Aeppli’s personal research focuses on photon science and nanotechnology for information technology and health care, and has resulted in recent publications on crystalline silicon as a quantum atom trap, non-destructive 3D integrated circuit inspection, and the exploitation of synthetic biology to create a lasing virus as a platform for digital medicine. In addition to service on many panels such as the the NRC (US) Decadal Survey of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics and the Swiss Science and Innovation Council, he is a cofounder and non-executive director of Bio-Nano Consulting, which has served a wide variety of clients including health care multinationals and startups.