Prof. A. Rufer received the M.S. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1976. In 1978, he joined BBC/ABB where he was involved in the fields of power electronics and control, such as high-power variable-frequency converters for drives. In 1993, he became an Assistant Professor at EPFL. Since 1996, he has been a full Professor and Head of the Industrial Electronics Laboratory, EPFL. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 publications on power electronics and applications, and he holds several patents. In Alfred Rufer’s lab, the research activities have focused on one hand on power converters, where several solutions and applications of multilevel converters have been studied, especially in the field of asymmetric or hybrid topologies. Another important field initiated by Alfred Rufer is dedicated to supercapacitive energy storage, where many applications have been studied. New research and development activities have recently been presented, where alternative energy storage devices with reduced aging phenomena or are easier to recycle than classical batteries are investigated and modeled. In 2006, Alfred Rufer was elected to the IEEE Fellow grade. Since March 2016 Alfred Rufer is a honorary professor from EPFL.