Kudos to Blaise Ribon! On August 31, 2022, he successfully defended his thesis in Mechanical Engineering at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), entitled « Research, prototyping and testing of new resin to guarantee the sealing of connectors ».

We are all very proud of Blaise’s academic success following his six-month internship in Fischer Connectors’ Research & Development center at Saint-Prex, Switzerland. This crowns his efforts to research and develop new sealing solutions for high-end electrical connectors, and to study the implementation of the solutions in the production line.

Blaise is one of the several EPFL graduates who took advantage of the internship opportunities our company offers students looking for Master projects or Master internships. Our R&D teams are always happy to accompany students like Blaise during their last master thesis semester. It’s a rewarding experience for the students who can gain hands-on insight from our industrial R&D, as well as for our teams who can learn a lot from such talented students embarked on Conextivity’s innovative and entrepreneurial projects going on within Fischer Connectors and Wearin’.

And like some of these interns, Blaise has decided to stay on in our R&D to join the ranks of the EPFL alumni working in our group. As of October 1, he’s been serving with full sail our R&D Engineering entity in the position of Junior Product Development Engineer.

‘With full sail’, to take up the expression he must be using often during his leisure time. Blaise is passionate about sailing aboard his small boat, preparing for the solo transatlantic yacht race Mini Transat, which will take place in 2025 for 6.5 meters (21 ft) long yachts starting in France and ending up in the Caribbean.

In parallel to his EPFL studies in Lausanne, Blaise participated in the technical development of SP80, the wind-powered boat setting out to reach the phenomenal speed of 80 knots, and thereby break the long-standing world sailing speed record of 65.45 knots. Fischer Connectors has been a technological partner of SP80 since February 2022. Its solutions support the transmission of the boat’s sensor data.

>> More on Blaise Ribon’s Mini Transat project at https://sites.google.com/view/team-ribon-6-50/ (in French)