IC welcomes Sabine Süsstrunk as new Dean!

By Tanya Petersen

IC welcomes Sabine Süsstrunk as new Dean!

Last night, staff and students from across EPFL gathered in the BC atrium to welcome Sabine Süsstrunk as 5th Dean of the IC School. In a now established IC tradition, Urbanke handed her the 'IC Key'.

Süsstrunk joined EPFL in 1999 and since 2014 has been head of the Images and Visual Representation Laboratory (IVRL). She has a BS in Scientific Photography from ETH Zürich, an MS in Electronic Publishing from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States, and a PhD on computing chromatic adaptation from the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Reflecting on the past four years and looking ahead to the next, both Urbanke and Süsstrunk sat down with IC's Tanya Petersen.

Rüdiger Urbanke

What do you see as your key achievements as IC Dean?

Four years ago, we set out the goal of bringing IC closer to the rest of EPFL and to strengthen our position in key areas. To this end, we fostered strategic collaborations and joint hires with the School of Life Sciences and the School of Basic Sciences, reinforcing IC's role as a central player on campus. We recruited outstanding new faculty and established IC as a force to be reckoned with in quantum science. Our faculty also played a pivotal role in launching the AI Center, the Swiss AI Initiative, and the Swiss National AI Center, as well as creating world-class research LLMs such as Meditron and Apertus.

How would you describe the IC School in 2025?

IC is bigger, stronger, and more vibrant than ever, with more students than at any point in our history. This growth is sustained not only by our faculty, but also by the tireless efforts of our administrative, IT, and technical staff. Their dedication behind the scenes is essential to everything we do, and we are extremely fortunate to count on such a committed team.

What are you looking forward to doing now?

After four rewarding years, I am looking forward to a sabbatical and to restarting research collaborations across the globe. It will be a pleasure to return with renewed focus to the scientific questions that inspired me at the beginning of my career.

Sabine Süsstrunk

What is both the biggest challenge and opportunity you see for the IC School in the coming 4 years?

We live in a post-truth world where science is under pressure, a world in which objective facts are becoming less influential than appeals to emotion and personal belief. At the same time funding for science will not increase. This is a challenge but also an opportunity. We need to find innovative and maybe unconventional new partnerships and funding to push the boundaries of knowledge, continuing to deliver positive impacts for society in our education and research excellence, our entrepreneurship and technology transfer. Last, but not least, our School was ranked 4th in Europe in the QS Rankings 2025 in the field of computer science and information systems - we are so close to a medal placement, and we will keep striving to be on that podium!

What do you think the three biggest things in computer science will be from now through to the end of the decade?

If I could answer this with certainty I probably wouldn't be here, I would be at the helm of a start-up with my crystal ball! I do believe that AI, quantum computing and privacy and security will remain at the forefront of our focus, but we may be blown away at the speed at which they evolve. They will continue to develop incredibly fast, faster than we have ever seen. And we will always be ready for new research directions that we cannot identify now but may appear on the horizon anytime.

What are you looking forward to most as Dean?

I really look forward to interacting more closely with all the people that make the IC School so great.

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