College of Management of Technology – Annual report 2025
Foreword from the dean
Dear Reader,
It is my great pleasure to present the 2025 Annual Report of the College of Management of Technology at EPFL.
The year 2025 has been marked by several important developments for our College. From the launch of the Entrepreneurship Education Hub (EHUB) to the successful ETH Domain evaluation process, the past year has highlighted the growing importance of management and entrepreneurship within leading technological institutions such as EPFL.
A major development of 2025 was the launch of the Entrepreneurship Education Hub (EHUB), an initiative designed to strengthen and coordinate entrepreneurship education across EPFL. Through EHUB, we aim to provide students from all disciplines with new opportunities to develop entrepreneurial skills and transform innovative ideas into successful ventures.
The launch of EHUB also reflects a broader evolution taking place across leading technical universities worldwide. Increasingly, institutions are moving toward a model that integrates science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and business, a trend often referred to as “STEMB.” This development was strongly reflected in the recommendations of the 2025 ETH Domain evaluation, which takes place every seven years and included an in-depth review of our College by an international panel of experts. The evaluation reaffirmed the importance of integrating management, entrepreneurship, economics, and finance into leading technological institutions. The evaluation provided valuable recommendations that will help guide our future priorities.
Throughout the year, our faculty, researchers, and students continued to contribute outstanding work in management science, economics, finance, entrepreneurship, and data-driven decision-making. Our Master’s, doctoral, and executive education programs continue to attract exceptional students and professionals from Switzerland and around the world, and our graduates continue to achieve outstanding career outcomes, making us proud through the impact they create and the skills and expertise they bring to their respective fields. We are confident that many of them will go on to assume positions of leadership and responsibility in the years ahead. At the same time, our faculty continued to distinguish themselves through major research grants, editorial appointments at leading journals, influential and widely cited research, keynote presentations at international conferences, and outreach activities that increasingly shape managerial and public-sector practice.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and partners for their continued dedication, energy, and support. Their contributions are essential to the success and continued evolution of the College.
Finally, while I traditionally invite you to “explore the pages that follow,” this year those pages are entirely online. I invite you to discover the highlights, achievements, and ongoing initiatives of the College throughout this report.
Kind regards,
Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, Director College of Management of Technology
Faculty highlights
Portraits
“My research pulls together economics, computer science & management“
Complicated algorithms are (almost) a walk in the park for Andrés Cristi, who holds EPFL’s newly created Chair of Game Theory and Operations in EPFL’s College of Management of Technology .
“I remain a physicist at heart”
Laurent-Dominique Piveteau teaches strategic innovation management at the College of Technology Management. The new professor of practice, who is also CEO of Debiotech, draws on his experience in the field of medical technology transfer.
“I apply an engineer’s mindset to a non-engineering discipline”
Michaël Aklin likes to challenge students to think about what happens outside the “safe space” of the laboratory. Named the 2025 best teacher in the management of technology and entrepreneurship section, he reminds those who attend his classes that new technology inevitably has ripple effects across society.
Faculty news, grants & awards
Faculty news
Appointments
March 2025: Federica Zeni appointed assistant professor tenure track in sustainable finance
Invited professors
May 2025: Prof. Li Yan, Texas A&M University
May – June 2025: Prof. Luhao Zhang, Johns Hopkins University
Nov 2025 – July 2026: Prof. Amanda Williams, emlyon Business School
Nominations
July 2025: Prof. Daniel Kuhn is elected EUROPT Fellow 2025
Grants
Principal investigator
E4S*
* part of the funds raised by E4S center (EPFL, HEC Lausanne, IMD) which are managed at EPFL
Project & funding agency
- Contribution to E4S Master in Sustainable Management & Technology: Richemont
- Contribution to E4S activites on sustainability research: UBS SME, Fondation Valery, SPEI, Ville de Lausanne, Schlumberger Fondation, Société Académique Vaudoise, Walder Wyss SA
Awards
June 2025
- Philipp Schneider wins the 2025 Web Conference Best Paper Award
May 2025
- Prof. Damir Filipovic (with Nicolas Camenzind): GAUSS Prize for their paper “Stripping the Swiss discount curve using kernel ridge regression” published in the European Actuarial Journal.
August 2025
- Mengmeng Li wins 2nd place in the best Student Paper Prize at ICSP
September 2025
- Best Poster Jury Award for PhD student Anaëlle Touré at the Energy Summer School 2025 organized by ETH Zurich
October 2025
- Best Teacher Award for the Financial Engineering section for Prof. Andreas Fuster
- Best Teacher Award for the Management, Technology & Entrepreneurship section for Prof. Michaël Aklin
- Best Teaching Assistant Award for the Financial Engineering section for Federico Baldi Lanfranchi, PhD student
- Best Teacher Assistant Award for the Management, Technology & Entrepreneurship section for Mengmeng Li and Roy Sarkis, PhD students
- Swiss Life Award for Academic Excellence for Amirmahdi Hosseinabadi, MFE graduate
- 2025 BCV Award for Academic Excellence for Marco Giuliano, MFE graduate
- 2025 Patek Philippe Award for Jonas Schweiger, MTE graduate
- Award for Academic Excellence for Rebecca Kessler, SMT graduate
- Prof. Thomas Weber wins the Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE 7th International Conference on Applied Computational Intelligence in Information Systems (ACIIS) at the Universiti Teknologi Brunei
- 2025 EPFL Doctorate Award for Dr. Bahar Taskesen, EDMT graduate
Education
News
Powdered Soap Dispenser Wins Circular Economy Innovation Prize
The graduate course “Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering” brought together students from various fields of study at EPFL to tackle prototyping challenges focused on developing devices for a circular economy.
A visit to the sources of digital transformation
Participants of the EMBA program at the College of Management of Technology had the opportunity to discover a selection of the latest technologies developed in EPFL’s research laboratories. This enabled these professionals from different backgrounds to gain a better understanding of the long process between developing a cutting-edge product and bringing it to market.
SMT students tackle real-world sustainability challenges
Third-semester students from the Master in Sustainable Management and Technology (SMT) team up with organizations to develop practical solutions for a more sustainable future through Transformative Projects.
Key figures
Master programs
2025 MFE graduates
2025 MTE graduates
2025 SMT graduates
Minors
2024-25 Minor MFE
2024-25 Minor MTE
Bachelor courses
2024-25 Bachelor students
Doctoral programs
2025 EDFI theses
2025 EDMT theses
Executive Education
2024-25 EPFL EMBA graduates
2025 CAS Management in Life sciences graduates
2025 CAS in Sustainable Resilient Value Chain graduates
2025 Short executive courses participants
Research
News
The Economics of Over-the-Counter Markets
Prof. Julien Hugonnier has published a new book at Princeton University Press entitled “The Economics of Over-the-Counter Markets: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Decentralized Exchange”. It is a comprehensive book that delves into the intricate workings of over-the-counter (OTC) markets, which are prevalent in the trading of corporate and government bonds, as well as many financial derivatives.
PhD students showcase their work at the 2025 EDMT Research Day
The Doctoral Program in Management of Technology (EDMT) celebrated its annual Research Day with a dynamic showcase of student research and scholarly exchange. Mohammad Shahverdikondori was awarded the 2025 Best Poster Presentation, with Roy Sarkis recognized as the runner-up.
A clearer signal of how inventors learn & build on each other’s ideas
A new study published in the prestigious Strategic Management Journal by EPFL researcher Gaétan de Rassenfosse and collaborators introduces a novel way to trace how knowledge flows among inventors and firms—by looking inside the body of patent documents. The authors show that “in-text” patent citations provide a much cleaner signal of where ideas originate than front-page citations, which researchers have traditionally relied on.
Key figures
Focal areas
Swiss Finance Institute
- Asset pricing
- Corporate finance
- Financial economics
- Financial engineering
- Financial technology
- International finance
- Macroeconomics
- Machine learning in finance
- Private equity and venture capital
- Risk management
- Sustainable finance
Management of Technology & Entrepreneurship Institute
- Algorithmic game theory
- Business Analytics
- Economic analysis
- Entrepreneurial strategies
- Machine learning
- Management of innovation
- Mechanism design
- Operations & supply chain management
- Optimization
- Technology commercialization
- Technology & IP policy
Rankings & bibliometrics
Rankings
Forschungsmonitoring, a ranking in business administration and economics established by the Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) at ETH Zurich, shows the research excellence of the College of Management of Technology. The lifetime rankings of four professors of the College show that they are among the top 5% most impactful researchers in the German speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) for their publications in leading academic journals in the field of business administration and economics. See more…
The KOF ranking reflects the excellence and strong academic impact of the research carried out at the College. Based on the publications in the top journals in the field of business administration, the Forschungsmonitoring ranking further shows that EPFL ranks 9th in comparison to the best universities in the German speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. See more…
Note: This ranking hasn’t been updated and showcases here only publications and forthcoming articles from the years 2020 to 2024.
Bibliometrics
Method & source
The publications of CDM researchers indexed in Clarivate Web of Science with publication dates from 2021 to 2025 were consulted and it was determined that the most frequent research domains (web of science categories) were: management; operations research & management science; business; business, finance; economics; social sciences, mathematical methods. The areas account for more than 70% of CDM’s output.
Using a filter by these research areas, institutions around the world were compared with respect to the Category Normalized Citation Impact and percent of publications in the top percent most cited. Both are measures of citations received by publications, and are indicators of the global impact and influence.
Category Normalized Citation Impact
EPFL’s score of 1.58 indicates that EPFL’s papers are cited 58% more than the typical papers (considering the document type, year of publication and subject area).
% documents in top 10%
EPFL’s score of 22.01 indicates that 22,01% of EPFL’s papers are in the top 10% most cited papers (considering the document type, year of publication and subject area).
Publications
Research seminars
2025 CDM publications
2025 Research seminars
Outreach
News
“Innovators must remain free to experiment”
Dominique Foray, honorary professor at EPFL, explores the current challenges surrounding innovation in his latest book. He examines how the delicate balance between economics, social norms and technology shapes its development.
Showcase E4S Impact Innovation Summit
The Enterprise for Society Center (E4S) organized the 2025 Showcase edition in September 2025 under the theme “Innovating for the Wellbeing of humans and ecosystems”.
Negar Kiyavash at the AI Summit 2025: Shaping Europe’s AI
Prof. Negar Kiyavash took part in the AI summit in Turku, Finland, which brought together researchers, business leaders and policymakers from across Europe and the world, on November 17, 2025.
Facts & figures
Personnel
Expenditures
Organizational chart 2025
