Research-IDEAS

A joint initiative of Zeiss and EPFL

The Research-IDEAS initiative of ZEISS and EPFL aims at fostering a research-oriented industry-academia cooperation by addressing the broader research community at EPFL to connect research with advanced development activities at ZEISS.

Specific activities are:

• Defining and shaping research jointly based on the feedback to specific calls
• Organizing workshops on joint activities, related research at EPFL and applied research at ZEISS
• Providing touch points with industry for students, faculty and start-ups
• Setting up a student prize sponsorship (ZEISS student prize)

Call Process: Focus on Seed Projects

The core if the initiative is to initiate and support research projects in focus areas defined by the scientific committee (SC) with the prospect of becoming joint research activities. The IDEAS fund will finance such seed projects of typically one year duration with a budget of about 100 k€. Once a year, a workshop will be organized in order to present the results of these seed projects (typically 2 to 3 per year). The most promising projects may be continued by joint research activities financed either by ZEISS or by another funding.

Call Topics: Focus on Technology Trends

The focus areas concern enabling technologies for applications in medical diagnosis and visualization, life cell imaging and optical metrology and inspection.