Sharing great ideas with hospitality management students, alumni and industry partners

Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne
Route de Cojonnex 18
Lausanne 25, 1000
Switzerland

Caroline Duetsch Kubik

An EHL Alumnus from 1996 and daughter of a 2 Michelin Star chef, Caroline Duetsch Kubik’s early professional life was spent with several famous chefs. Now a food industry marketing and communication specialist and strategist, Caroline’s passion is food behavior change and its emotional impacts, and it is to this that she applies insight and detailed analysis. Currently working for Mondelēz International, a Global Snacking Powerhouse, Caroline’s winning combination of big ideas and bigheartedness are put to work on global portfolios. She continually provokes and questions the food world and the behaviour changes inspiring others to create food experiences for the future.

Doug Manuel

Doug is Founder and Director of Sewa Beats, an international consultancy that supports leaders to bring their heart to work. The company has been steadily expanding across the world, delivering high-impact, interactive management learning. Music, rhythm and voice have been constant elements in his life and resonance forms the foundation of his work. Inspired by the culture and traditions of Africa, after giving up an 8 year career as a Producer for BBC documentaries, he spent six months in West Africa in 1997 learning with several Master Musicians. Doug brings a wealth of experience working with both private and public sector organizations around the globe.

Radhika Murti

Radhika is Programme Coordinator for nature based solutions to disaster risk management at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN in Switzerland. Having grown up in cyclone prone areas in Fiji and fire prone areas in Australia, Radhika is passionate about changing behavior and perceptions towards disasters. She also dedicates herself to getting challenges of small island states in the Pacific represented in global decision making mechanisms for development, health and environment, and is pursuing PhD studies on climate change and disasters with communities in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. With all this, Zumba, scuba-diving and yoga keep her sane.

Daniel Raven-Ellison

Daniel is a guerrilla geographer and National Geographic Emerging Explorer who inspires people to explore in new and creative ways. His work focuses on nurturing curiosity and encouraging people to explore playfully yet critically. A founder of The Geography Collective and director Explorer HQ, Daniel works with innovative teams to create events, books and social-exploration websites including Mission:Explore, a major initiative to get more children and families exploring, playing and learning outdoors. Through his Urban Earth project Daniel has walked across some of the world’s biggest cities and continues to organise journeys that start conversations and provoke new thinking.

Astrid Stuckelberger

An ‘academic activist’, Dr Stuckelberger is an internationally recognized expert in aging. A senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Geneva School of Public Health, Astrid has eclectic, multidisciplinary expertise - from biology to psychology and public health – which in the last decade or so she has applied to focusing on the development of the longevity revolution, anti-ageing medicine and innovation. She has published several books, and more than 100 scientific articles, policy papers, governmental and UN reports. Amongst Astrid’s international positions are President of the Geneva International Network on Ageing and permanent representative of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.

Pasha Bakhtiar

After more than 12 years in the “traditional” business space – most recently Managing Director of Lombard Odier & Cie’s office in the UAE – Pasha left the world of banking in September 2010 to found Willow Impact Investors: an investment firm providing growth equity to SMEs. Centered on the principle of a “double bottom line” where emphasis is placed both on financial returns and the social impact generated by investments, Willow is committed to demonstrating that a new, more innovative, inclusive and creative form of capitalism is needed. Honoured as a Young Global Leader in 2012 by the World Economic Forum, Pasha holds a Private Pilots License and enjoys ski touring and long distance triathlons.

Olivier Küng

Fascinated by technology and entrepreneurship, Olivier dropped out from his PHD thesis at the Vision Lab of the computer science department of EPFL to co-found the start-up Pix4D in June 2011. With his colleague Christoph Strecha, they created a unique technology that allows producing high precision 3D landscapes out of thousands of images taken by flying robots! Together they went through the challenges of turning an academic project into a rapidly growing business that is now used by hundreds of people, companies and NGOs on the five continents to better map the world.

Christine Demen Meier

Christine is a practitioner-turned-professor. After graduating from EHL in 1974, she notably created and simultaneously managed several restaurants in Geneva and Montreux for more than 20 years. She returned to EHL in 1998 to teach marketing and management of SMEs, and obtained a MBA from HEG Fribourg/ Bern and then a Ph.D. in management science from the Université de Caen (France). Since 2010, she also carries out prospective studies on jobs in the F&B industry as the holder of the Food & Beverage Industry Chair of EHL, created in partnership with Danone Professional, Nestlé Professional and Unilever Food Solutions.

Elissa Doyle

Elissa hails from the USA – Pittsburgh to be exact – and is currently an Executive MBA student at EHL. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Pennsylvania State University, where she studied Public Relations. After working in event management and marketing in Pittsburgh and New York City, she wanted to take her career international, which is what brought her to EHL. She is currently studying the relationship between marketing, operations, and guest expectations. In addition, she is always interested in how hotels are, or are not, incorporating social media in their marketing plans.