![\"Programme](\"https://www.epfl.ch/campus/art-culture/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/LES_CULTURELLES_1920x1080_programme_complet.png\")
\r\n\r\nPhotonics Day is a yearly event that aims to promote research discussions and networking among members of the EPFL photonics community, as well as researchers and industry players in the photonics sector. The program includes invited talks from world leaders in the field, a thesis presentation by the winner of the Best EDPO distinction, a scientific picture contest organised by EPC, as well as presentations by students in the Doctoral Program in Photonics, who will compete in the 180-Second Thesis Competition.
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\r\nThis year the Photonics Day will take place on Thursday October 22, 2026 at the EPFL Forum Rolex.
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\r\nParticipation is free and includes lunch. Registration opens in September and is mandatory by October 12, 2026. You’ll find both the registration form and the full program on the same page.
How social robots look, behave, and offer support should reflect the people and environments they encounter. Drawing on studies with older adults in rural Indiana and urban Houston, this talk examines how individual needs, preferences, everyday surroundings, and care relationships can inform the physical forms and interaction styles of future social robots.
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\r\nThrough participatory design, observations, and interviews, I center older adults’ perspectives on meaningful support, acceptable interaction, and personal boundaries. Encounters with robot companions have brought moments of enjoyment, surprise, and support, while revealing challenges involving communication, expectations, privacy, and control. I explore how embodiment, movement, voice, and interaction pacing shape these experiences, and how caregivers can support engagement while preserving older adults’ choices and dignity.
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\r\nThese findings inform design requirements for robots that people can understand, guide, and adjust as their circumstances change. I connect them to opportunities for adaptive robot behavior, accessible interaction, and shared control, including how robots might recognize when assistance is welcome and make their actions easier to interpret or interrupt. The talk positions older adults as active contributors to robotics research, whose lived expertise can shape both future robot companions and the broader systems of support surrounding them.
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\r\nBiography
\r\nChorong Park, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty at the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, where she leads the Empathetic Lifespan AI & Robotics for Aging (ELARA) Lab. Her research connects human–robot interaction, human-centered AI, and participatory design to develop social robots and supportive technologies with older adults and caregivers.
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\r\nDrawing on studies in rural Indiana and urban Houston, she investigates how robots’ physical forms and interactions can fit older adults’ needs, surroundings, and everyday lives. Her work centers older adults’ perspectives on companionship, support, privacy, personal boundaries, and dignity, including how caregiver involvement can preserve individual choice and control.
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\r\nHer research is informed by more than 500 hours of volunteer technology support with older adults and people with disabilities and has appeared at ACM CHI, ACM ASSETS, and IEEE robotics venues. She earned her Ph.D. in Technology, with a graduate minor in Gerontology, and her master’s degree in UX Design from Purdue University.
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\r\nFurther information:
\r\nUniversity of Houston research feature
\r\n(https://stories.uh.edu/2026-ai-robots-for-older-adults/index.html)
\r\nELARA Lab website
\r\n(https://elaralab.org/)
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This paper studies optimal financial flexibility in debt issuance. A borrower raises funds for an initial investment and may need financing after observing a private liquidity shock. Under non exclusive lending, new lenders price only their claims, so additional borrowing dilutes existing debt and leads to excessive leverage. The optimal simple debt contract is an endogenous debt limit. It captures the intertemporal commitment–flexibility tradeoff: more borrowing today fi nances investment but increases dilution incentives, requiring tighter limits on future borrowing. Richer clauses, including performance-sensitive debt and contingent prepayment provisions, re store the exclusive-lending benchmark by compensating existing lenders when new financing is raised.
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\r\nCivil and Environmental Engineering doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11896
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker
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\r\nPlease register via the Google Form here:
\r\nhttps://forms.gle/e6UF2Sr9LdcgNLUn7
Weekly BioEngineering Talks (Lunch Provided)
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\r\nINVITED SPEAKER:
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\r\nDe novo design of light-responsive proteins
\r\nDr. Alexander Hilditch, EPFL Laboratory of Protein Design & Immunoengineering
\r\nHost: Prof. Bruno Correia
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\r\nBioEngineering Talks mandatory EDBB Seminar Attendance (1st-Year PhD Students)\r\n
Astrocytes are the predominant glial cells in the mammalian central nervous system (CNS) and play essential roles in maintaining neural circuit activity and tissue homeostasis. In response to CNS insult, including traumatic injury or implantation of a medical device, astrocytes undergo a conserved, temporally regulated reprogramming that reshapes their prioritized functions to protect adjacent neural tissue. The nature and extent of astrocyte reprogramming critically influences outcomes after CNS insult. For example, regeneration after traumatic CNS injury in adult mammals is limited by local responding astrocytes lacking sufficient self-renewal capacity. By contrast, the CNS of neonate (newborn) mammals possesses exceptional parenchymal repair capacity owing to immature astrocytes with elevated proliferative and migratory potential. In the context of an implanted medical device, the spatial extent of astrocyte reprogramming and how impacted astrocytes respond to any further device micromotion, latent infection, or other persistent device-derived stimuli, dictates device performance and longevity. Engineering astrocyte responses to promote targeted functional gains while preserving key capabilities of healthy neural tissue astrocytes will be critical to enabling effective neural regeneration therapies and improving long-term performance of implanted devices. In this talk, I will outline our emerging understanding of how adult astrocytes adaptively reprogram in response to CNS injury and implanted foreign bodies, drawing insights from innovative astrocyte-specific transcriptomic bioassays. I will also provide an overview of biomaterial and cell-grafting strategies that we are exploring to direct astrocyte responses in preclinical models of stroke, spinal cord injury, and foreign body responses.
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\r\nBio:
\r\nDr. Timothy O’Shea, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at Boston University (BU). Tim grew up in Brisbane, Australia and completed a Bachelor of Medical Engineering (First Class Honours) and a Masters in Engineering Management at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) before moving to the US for graduate school. He completed his PhD study in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics within the collaborative Health Sciences and Technology program of the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where we conducted PhD thesis research with Institute Professor Robert Langer. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at UCLA, he worked with Professors Michael Sofroniew (Neurobiology) and Timothy Deming (Bioengineering) developing and testing novel bioengineering tools to study biological mechanisms involved in CNS injury and repair as well as the CNS foreign body response to implants. Since Fall 2020 he has been leading the Glia Engineering Lab at BU where he has received numerous awards including the Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from NIH and grants from several spinal cord injury research foundations such as Craig H Neilsen, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Bryon Reisch, and Wings for Life.