Meet the talented engineers and students from ETHZ and EPFL building Apertus, along with researchers from several labs at EPFL and ETHZ. We're creating impactful models that embody Swiss values of transparency and collaboration, serving both our research community and society at large.
Allen Huang
Research Engineer
Hanna Yukhymenko
Research Engineer
Robert Smith
Research Engineer
Oleg Lavrovsky
Community Manager
Dr. Valentina Pyatkin
Research Engineer
Sean Caroll
Technical Program Manager
Raphael Kreft
Research Engineer
Dani Tamayo
Research Engineer
Dr. Konstantinos Pitas
Research Engineer
Mel Zürcher
Research Engineer
Current Student Researchers
| Ahmed Rockey Saikia | Student Researcher | Audio |
| Ahmad Fraji | Student Researcher | Applications |
| Yuhei Fukuhara | Student Researcher | Inference and Multimodal Evaluations |
| Alex Padula | Student Researcher | Coding Environments |
| Khanh Nguyen | Student Researcher | Coding Environments |
| Aryan Ahadinia | Student Researcher | Inference Optimisation |
| Anunay Yadav | Student Researcher | Multimodal Evals |
| Bich (Rubi) Ngoc Doan | Student Researcher | Multicultural Evals |
| Ender Dogan Isik | Student Researcher | Data Generation |
In addition, a larger list of MSc students, PhD students, and Postdocs contribute and lead parts of the Apertus development as part of their education and research.
Collaborations
Beyond our team, we collaborate with 30+ MSc students, PhD students, and Postdocs from various academic labs. Our collaborations include but are not limited to the following groups:
- Machine Learning and Optimization Lab - Prof. Martin Jaggi, EPFL
- Natural Language Processing Lab - Prof. Antoine Bosselut, EPFL
- Learning and Adaptive Systems Group - Prof. Andreas Krause, ETH Zurich
- Scalable Parallel Computing Lab - Prof. Torsten Hoefler, ETH Zurich
- Law, Economics, and Data Science Lab - Prof. Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich
- Caglar Gulcehre Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Research - Prof. Caglar Gulcehre, EPFL
- Efficient Architectures and Systems Lab - Prof. Ana Klimović, ETH Zurich
- Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation Lab - Prof. Mennatallah El-Assady, ETH Zurich
- Data Science Lab - Prof. Robert West, EPFL
- Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health and Humanitarian Response Technologies (LiGHT) - Prof. Annie Hartley, EPFL
- Institute of Informatics - Prof. Andrei Kucharavy, HES-SO Valais-Wallis
- HPC Lab, Institute for Data Science - Prof. Tomasz Kacprzak, FHNW
- ETH AI Center - Fellows and researchers
- EPFL AI Center - Fellows and researchers
- Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) - Several full-time employees
Alumni
Former team members who have moved on to new opportunities:
| Eduard Ďurech | Research Engineer | Post-training (joined a startup) | 2026 |
| Bartosz Szostakiewicz | Semester Project | Coding Environments | 2026 |
| Francesco Monti | Semester Project | Multilingual Reasoning | 2026 |
| Mauro Pellonara | Semester Project | Multilingual Reasoning | 2026 |
| Youssef Boughizane | Semester Project | Scalable RL | 2026 |
| Mahdi Atallah | Semester Project | Scalable RL | 2026 |
| Sacha Godey | Semester Project | Audio-Text Alignment | 2026 |
| Clément Rousseau | Semester Project | RL for Hard-to-Verify Domains | 2026 |
| Badr Al Mahouri | Semester Project | Vision RL | 2026 |
| Loic Deslarzes | Course Project | Tool Gym | 2026 |
| Leonard Mantel | Course Project | Speech Tokenizers | 2026 |
| Aleks Stepancic | Course Project | Hallucination Steering | 2026 |
| Tanguy Dieudonné | Course Project | Memorisation in Language Models | 2026 |
| Tobias von Arx | Course Project | Memorisation in Language Models | 2026 |
| Rada Kamysheva | Course Project | Personalised Data Generation | 2026 |
| Luca Baumann | Course Project | Post-training Data | 2026 |
| Jenny (Yizhen) Wang | Course Project | Agentic LLMs | 2026 |
| Tommy Chu | Student Researcher | Multimodality - Health | 2026 |
| Alessandro Tazza | Student Researcher | RL Pipeline Optimisation | 2026 |
| Marian Schneider | Student Researcher | Alignment | 2026 |
| Davit Melikidze | Student Researcher, Master Thesis | Alignment | 2026 |
| Juan Garcia Giraldo | Student Researcher, Master Thesis | Alignment, Steering and Interpretability | 2026 |
| Nicola Dall'Acqua | Bachelor Thesis | Synthetic Data Generation | 2026 |
| Cédric Laubacher | Master Thesis | Long-Context RL | 2026 |
| Wanja Pletscher | Bachelor Thesis | LLM Interpretability | 2026 |
| Matteo Santelmo | Master Thesis | RLVR | 2026 |
| Elena Lyulina | Master Thesis | Memorisation in Attention Mechanisms | 2026 |
| Guanshujie Fu | Master Thesis | MoE Pretraining | 2026 |
| Petr Grinberg | Master Thesis | Multimodal Language Models | 2026 |
| Mukhammadali Sayfiddinov | Student Researcher | Reinforcement Learning | 2026 |
| Antoni Solergibert | Research Engineer | Pretraining (joined Nvidia) | 2025 |
| Nicola Irmiger | Semester Project | Multimodality | 2025 |
| Dr. Kyle Matoba | Research Engineer | Pretraining | 2025 |
| Vanya Pavlov | Student Researcher | Alignment | 2025 |
| Marco Scialanga | Student Project | Alignment | 2025 |
| Ilia Badanin | Student Researcher | Serving & Post-training | 2025 |
| Mathieu Sauser | Student Researcher | Data Processing | 2025 |
| Dhia Garbaya | Student Researcher | Efficiency | 2025 |
| Camille Challier | Master Thesis | RL with verifiable Rewards | 2025 |
| Luca Mouchel | Master Thesis | Distributed RL Training | 2025 |
| Nathan Ranchin | Student Researcher | RL with verifiable Rewards | 2025 |
| Jakhongir Saydaliev | Master Thesis | RL with verifiable Rewards | 2025 |
| Jiaming Jiang | Student Researcher | RL with verifiable Rewards | 2025 |
| Clément Charmillot | Master Thesis | RL with verifiable Rewards | 2025 |
| Rongxiao Qu | Student Researcher | Multimodality | 2025 |