ESC welcomes three new members
The Energy Science Center (ESC) is growing and welcomes three new members: Milica Topalović, Manuela Brunner and Felix Donat become part of the competence center.
Milica Topalović is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on contemporary territories and urbanization processes, addressing social and environmental challenges both within the city-territory and across wider landscapes.
She graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and earned a Master’s degree from the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands. In 2006, she joined ETH Zurich as Head of Research at the ETH Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute. From 2011 to 2015, Milica held a research professorship at the Singapore-ETH Centre and subsequently received several research grants from the Future Cities Laboratory. Since 2021, she has co-directed the ETH Zurich / EPFL Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design.
Her work spans innovative architectural pedagogy, urban research, design and planning practice, as well as public engagement and participation in concrete territories. Her research interests are in extended urbanization, critical cartography, critical resource geographies, agrarian questions and agroecological change, renewable energy transition in concrete territories, energy communities and energy solidarity, and territorial design for socio-ecological change.
Manuela Brunner is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich and the external page WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos. Before moving to Davos, she studied Geography and Climate Sciences at the University of Bern, obtained a PhD from the Universities of Zurich and Grenoble-Alpes, and did postdocs at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado.
Her research focuses on extreme climatic and hydrological events such as floods and droughts. Manuela studies the hydro-meteorological drivers of extreme events, develops methods for their prediction, and assesses changes in the water cycle and extremes. Her group at ETH and SLF quantifies the hazard potential and water availability in mountain regions under global change.
Manuela's research interests are in hydrology, flood and drought frequency analysis, prediction in ungauged basins, spatial extremes, stochastic simulation of extremes and streamflow time series, climate change impact assessments on extremes and water resources, human influence on extremes and water availability, and climate impacts in mountain regions.
Felix Donat is a Lecturer and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Energy and Process Engineering, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering (D-MAVT) at ETH Zurich. He obtained a Diploma in Business Administration and Engineering from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg in 2011, which included a research stay at Imperial College in London. He received a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2016. In the same year, he joined the Laboratory of Energy Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich, with his research focusing on materials for gas–solid reactions for energy applications and solid looping concepts in the context of CO2 capture. He is also a Scientific Adviser to companies developing technologies for the removal of CO2 from air.
The Energy Science Center is happy to welcome the three of them as new members.