The Team

Dr. Christian Roth is a Senior Scientist at the Chair of Artifical Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing. He joined ETH in 2015 after a postdoctoral stay at MIT’s Impact and Crashworthiness Lab. Dr. Roth received his PhD from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris for his thesis work on the effect of strain rate on ductile fracture. He came to Paris after completing his Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering at the Bundeswehr University Munich and working as an Engineering Officer for the German Air Force. He carried out his Diploma Thesis at MIT, working on porosities in aluminum welds in collaboration with BMW. His current research is concerned with plasticity and ductile fracture under extreme conditions. Dr. Roth also holds an MBA from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.  

Professor Vincent Grolleau joined ETH in 2017, from Université de Bretagne Sud (France), IRDL laboratory, CNRS UMR 6027. He obtained his PhD from Ecole Centrale de Nantes in the field of metal cutting and manufacturing, after completing his Master’s degree at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay. His research interests focus on the development of new experimental techniques dedicated to severe testing conditions in strain rate and temperature as well as explicit damping algorithms. Current developments concern in-plane torsion at quasi-static and high strain rates, forming limit tests with non-proportional loading, test automation for data-driven mechanics.

Bekim Berisha received his PhD from ETH Zurich on material modeling based on dislocation density theory in 2010. He came to Zurich after completing his Master’s degree in Computational Engineering at the Leibniz University of Hannover. His current research topics are related to material modeling based on Crystal Plasticity and Machine Learning methods as well as numerical optimization of forming processes. Teaching in the field of Optimization and Finite Element Analysis belong to the activities at ETH as well.

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Dr. Thomas Tancogne-Dejean received his Sc.D degree in 2018 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT for his numerical and experimental work on elastically-isotropic mechanical metamaterials. Before his Sc.D, Dr. Tancogne-Dejean graduated both from Ecole Polytechnique and from Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. He spent the summer 2016 as an intern in the Additive Manufacturing lab at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY and co-authored a patent on lightweight lattices. His current research focus on the experimental characterization of lithium-ion battery crashworthiness and the ductile fracture of additively-manufactured metals.

Martina Koch has a medical background with a higher education as a nurse, a further education in office management and training supervisor. She is skilled in many years of experience at Empa and ETH as an administrative assistant with consolidated knowledge in organizational, financial and human resources matters. She was a member of the rescue team at Empa for ten years and is experienced in first aid and safety issues.  

Erik de Best did his apprentice education in mechanics in Brazil, followed by Mechanical Engineering (Fontys, NL) and a MSc in Industrial Engineering at TU/e (NL). He started working in the areas of socioeconomics research and international project management. Once in Switzerland, he decided to return to his mechanical background, complementing it with experience in the fields of electronics and programming. Currently he works as mechatronics lead engineer on the development and automation of new machines for material testing.

Xueyang Li recently obtained his PhD at the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing in December 2022, after completing his Master degree in ETH in 2018. Originally from China, he received his Bachelor degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan, with a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2014. His research investigates the plasticity and fracture response of engineering metals at various strain rates and temperatures, with a special focus on using machine-learning to characterize the material behavior under large deformation and extreme loading conditions.

Xavier Colon is a first year PhD student from Université de Bretagne Sud (France), IRDL laboratory CNRS UMR 6027, since October 2021. He obtained a B.Sc. degree in mechanics in 2019 and a M.Sc. degree in solid and structural mechanics in 2021 at Sorbonne Université, France. His thesis focuses on metal sheets behavior at high strain rates and under non-proportional loading for crash applications

Arthur Girard is a third year PhD student at the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing. After having completed a bachelor degree at EPFL, he joined ETH for a Master degree in Mechanical Engineering. He gained experience in the design and manufacturing of composite materials in particular for maritime and aerospace application. Taking advantage of the knowledge developed to model material using Machine learning, he investigates how recurrent neural networks could deliver an efficient model to predict the behaviour of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic and improve delamination prediction.

Julian Heidenreich is a first year PhD student at the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing. He graduated with Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT as well as KIT. At MIT, he investigated the use of CNNs for estimating material and structural responses. Additional research works include the investigation of fiber-metal-laminates in cooperation with BMW, the examination of SPR-bonded hybrid joints at Daimler AG as well as the optimization of the CFRTs forming process at Fraunhofer ICL. His current research focuses on the application of ML models in the field of material modeling and numerical simulations.

Paul Meyer received his BSc (2019) from University of Twente for his work on process-property relations in solid-state additive manufacturing. He focused on modelling the microstructure evolution during heat treatment as an intern at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA). Paul Meyer joined Prof. Mohrs group during his MSc in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich. He completed his master thesis on the graph-based structure-property models in 2021. He continues working on graph neural networks for applications to mechanics.

Rui Barreira Morais Pinto is a PhD student at the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing. He graduated from the University of Porto, Portugal, with a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering, specializing in aerospace structures, with stays at EPFL and ETH Zurich throughout his education. He performed his master’s thesis under Prof. Laura de Lorenzis (ETH Zurich), modelling liquid-solid phase transition and one-way elastic coupling for water-absorbing solids. Before moving to ETH Zurich, at Brown University, he also performed atomistic simulations on dislocation core energies for BCC materials. His research interests span from solid mechanics and materials science to numerical methods, and is working on developing and applying machine learning models to multiscale constitutive modeling and surrogate finite element simulators. When not skiing, he is most likely to be found driving on mountain passes or on a racetrack. ORCID: external page https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2659-997X

Francesco Scipione has a physics engineering background with an M.Sc. in Micro and Nanosystems from ETH Zürich. He worked as a researcher in the field of vacuum sensors at the Micro and Nanosystem group of Prof. Hierold in a joint Innosuisse project with the semiconductor industry. He joined Prof. Mohr's group in 2024 as a PhD student, investigating machine learning applications for manufacturing. His interests span the whole machine learning spectrum, encompassing foundations, practical applications, and the latest advancements in the field.

Nils Koltzenburg joined the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing as PhD student in April 2024. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from KIT (Karlsruhe, Germany) with a focus on material mechanics and machine learning. The master’s thesis on failure of carbon fiber reinforced polymers was carried out at the Composites Research Group of the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). His research interests are mainly within the fields of material modelling and computational mechanics as well as machine learning.

Raphaël Pérot began his academic journey with studies in mathematics and physics at Lycée du Parc, before obtaining a Master’s degree specializing in Artificial Intelligence from CentraleSupélec. As part of a double degree program, he completed a Master by Research in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where his thesis focused on improving the generalization abilities of gradient boosting decision trees. During his time at NUS, Raphaël worked as a Research Assistant in the university's Department of Economics, contributing to various environmental econometrics projects.

In September 2024, Raphaël joined the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing as a PhD student. His research applies machine learning techniques to better understand edge fracture phenomena, drawing on experimental data and numerical simulations.