Alfred Rufer has been a full professor and head of the industrial Electronics Laboratory EPFL since 1996. He received the M.S. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1976. In 1978 he joined ABB where he was involved in the fields of high-power electronics and control. In 1993 he became an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He has authored or coauthored more than 200 publications on power electronics and applications, and he holds several patents. He was elected to the IEEE Fellow grade in 2006. Dr. Rufer's research activities focus on one hand on power converters as modular multilevel converters in asymmetric or hybrid technologies, and energy storage. Recently he has presented research for low aging, easy to recycle, hybrid energy storage device based on compressed air.