Julia SchmaleExpertise
atmospheric science, aerosol-cloud interactions, climate change in polar regions
Mission
Extreme environments are particularly sensitive to climate change and are transforming at accelerated rates. This can have important global repercussions. EERL aims to create integrated process understanding by investigating interactions between the atmosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, ocean, land and anthroposphere. The goal is to characterize climate-change relevant and vertically-resolved processes that are d
Dimitrios LignosProf. Lignos joined the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2016 from McGill University in Canada where he was a tenured Associate Professor and a William Dawson Scholar for Infrastructure Resilience. He holds a diploma (National Technical University of Athens, NTUA, 2003), M.S. (Stanford University, 2004) and Ph.D. (Stanford University, 2008). In addition, he was a post-doctoral scientist at Stanford University (2009) and in Kyoto University (2010). Prof. Lignos teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in seismic design, nonlinear behaviour of steel and composite structures as well as supplemental damping systems, Structural Stability, Nonlinear Analysis and Performance-based Earthquake Engineering. His awards for teaching, research and service in Civil Engineering include the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award (Faculty of Engineering, McGill University), as well as the Outstanding reviewer (2012, 2013) award from ASCE, the 2013 State-of-the-Art in Civil Engineering Award by ASCE and the 2014 Christophe Pierre Award for Research Excellence - Early Career. Just recently, he received the 2019 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE for significant contributions in developing state of the art methods to simulate extreme limit states in steel structures.Prof. Lignos is a member of ASCE and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He acts as an Associate Editor for Metal Structures and Seismic Effects of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He joined the Editorial Board of Earthquake Spectra and Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics International journals. He serves as an acting member of the CEN/TC 250/SC 8/WG 2 and has been selected as a member of the Project Team (PT2) for the Eurocode 8-Part 1 Current Revisions for Steel and Composite Structures. He is also a member of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) S16 technical committee for Steel Structures. Prof. Lignos is involved as a NEHRP consultant in numerous research-to-practice projects related to the behaviour and nonlinear modelling and analysis of structures applicable to the engineering practice through the Applied Technology Council (ATC). Detailed Curriculum Vitae (last update September 2018)
Isabella Di LenardoPh.D. in Theories and Art History. Isabella di Lenardo is senior scientist in Digital Humanities and Urban History. Her research activity is focused on digital tools and methods applied to Urban History. She is an expert in ancient cartography, city representations, cadastral sources interpreted through digital modeling, extraction and analysis systems.She's also interested in network analysis questioning the production and circulation of artistic and architectural knowledge in Europe XVIth – XVIIIth centuries in particular on North-South relationships and influences. The development of collaboration projects with European institutions and the activity carried out on various initiatives supported by the European Commission have allowed her to acquire specialism in the field of science applied to heritage, developing in particular specific skills for the enhancement of Cultural Heritage through digital tools. She leads projects in collaboration with Bibliothèque national de France (Paris), Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), Ecole nationale des chartes (Paris), Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris), Musée du Louvre, Archives Nationales de Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux. She supervised all the urban modeling simulations for the Venice Time Machine project and acted as content curator for all the exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Grand Palais-Paris, Datasquare - ArtLab-Lausanne, Museo Correr-Venice). She was Head of “Replica” project : digitizing 1 million photos of artworks in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice) and visual patterns extraction through a search engine for visual similarities. She has a Ph.D in Art History and also studied Archaeology and Urban Studies. She has published essays and articles about Venetian Art and Urban History and participated in many Art exhibitions in European museums. She coordinated summer schools and workshops about Digital Tools for Art History and Urban History. She attended conferences on digital methods for History in universities and patrimonial institutions.
Aravindhan VenkateswaranTeaching & PhD Courses Master project in Physics PHYS-599(b) The student realises a research project in a physics laboratory or in a company.
Charlotte GrossiordTeaching & PhD PhD Students Maxwell Zachary Wallace Bergström, Julie Anne Botzas-Coluni, Cross Jacob Heintzelman, Léo César Bernard Jacquat, Céline Joanna Sijlmans Past EPFL PhD Students Eugénie Mas, Laura Mekarni, Janisse Deluigi, Thibaut Juillard Courses Applied ecology ENV-422 The course will provide the ecological systems knowledge needed to question applied sustainability solutions. We willcritically assess the complexity of current environmental issues, illustrating basic ecological
Charlotte VandenbergheExpertise
academic project managementresearch and innovation funding advicesustainability in educationinter-and transdisciplinary research collaborationsorganization of outreach eventsscientific writing and communicationbiodiversity and ecologyquantum science and engineering
Mission
As an academic manager at EPFL, I contribute today to the University's three main missions which are education, research and innovation, in the strategic domains of sustainability and quantum science:1. as educational coordinato
Anni Matilda KauniskangasCurrent Work
I am currently working as a doctoral researcher as a part of Prof. Shchutska's group in experimental particle physics. I am a member of the LHCb and SND@LHC collaborations. My PhD thesis work is mainly focused on performing a measurement of a rare B-meson decay process using the data from the LHCb experiment.
Education MSci Physics | 2018 – 2022 Imperial College London
ResearchCurrent Research Fields Experimental high-energy physics (flavour physics)
Teaching & PhDPast teachin
Luis Miguel Garcia MartinTeaching & PhD Courses Master project in Physics PHYS-599(b) The student realises a research project in a physics laboratory or in a company. Particle physics: the flavour frontiers PHYS-471 This course will present experimental aspects of flavour physics primarily in the quark sector but also in the lepton sector and their role in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Marcel SalathéTeaching & PhD PhD Students Laura Espinosa Montalbán, Marouane Toumi, Rohan Singh Past EPFL PhD Students Gianrocco Lazzari, Martin Mathias Müller, Sharada Prasanna Mohanty Courses Digital epidemiology BIO-512 Epidemiology is foundational to medicine and public health. This course starts with the key principles of classical epidemiology, progressing through computational modeling techniques, and concluding with the digital approaches of today. Students will also develop a digital epidemiolo
Robert WestRobert West is a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at EPFL, where he heads the Data Science Lab. In his research, he develops and applies techniques in machine learning, computational social science, natural language processing, social network analysis, and data mining. Bob also collaborates closely with the Wikimedia Foundation, in his role as a Wikimedia Research Fellow. Bob’s work has won several awards, including best/outstanding paper awards at ICWSM’21, ICWSM’19, and WWW’13, a best-paper runner-up award at WWW’16, a Google Faculty Research Award, a Facebook Research Award, a Hewlett-Packard Graduate Fellowship, and a Facebook Graduate Fellowship. He is actively involved in the research community, e.g., as an Associate Editor of ICWSM and EPJ Data Science and as a co-founder of the Wiki Workshop (held at WWW and ICWSM) and the Applied Machine Learning Days. Bob received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, his MSc from McGill University, Canada, and his undergraduate degree from Technische Universität München, Germany.[Last updated: 25 Aug 2021]
Giovanni De CesareExpertise
Numerical simulation and physical modeling of hydraulic works and schemes; reservoir sedimentation and turbidity currents; reservoir sediment management; Ultrasonic Doppler flow measurement; river training work and restoration; soil bioengineering and nature based solutions; fluvial eco-morphology; rapid transients in pressurized waterways; technology transfer, commissioned studies and expert reports in applied hydraulics, hydraulic constructions and infrastructures; organization of continuous edu
Arianna MarchioroEducation PhD Thesis | Interfacial Charge Transfer Dynamics in Solid-State Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Solar Cells 2010 – 2014 EPFL Directed by Prof. J.-E. Moser and Prof. M. Grätzel MSc in Molecular and Biological Chemistry | 2008 – 2010 EPFL and Imperial College London (exchange program) BSc in Chemistry | 2005 – 2008 EPFL Professionals experiences Postdoctoral Research Associate 2014–2016 University of Washington, Seatt
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
Stéphane JoostExpertise
Geographic Information Science and spatial statisticsMolecular ecology, Landscape genomics, Seascape genomicsSpatial epidemiology, Health geographics
Publications Publications- List of publications
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Marco André Vieira Ruas, Manon Laetitia Pribille, Martine Valérie Besse Past EPFL PhD Students Estelle Rochat, Solange Catherine Gaillard, Oliver Michele Selmoni, Anaïs Ladoy, Annie Sandrine Guillaume Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Sylvie Stucki, Kevin Leempoel, Martí
Jean-Louis ScartezziniDirector of EPFL Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (1994-present); Founder & Director of ENAC Institute of Infrastructures, Resources and Environment (2002-2009); Founder & Director of EPFL Doctoral Program in Environment (2002-2009); Co-Director of EPFL Institute of Building Technology (1994-1997); Associate Professor of Building Physics at EPFL (1994-1997); Associate Professor of Building Physics at University of Geneva (1990-1997); Group Leader & Research Fellow at the EPFL Solar Energy Research Group (1981-1989); Research Fellow at the Applied Geophysics Institute of University of Lausanne (1980-1981).
Radoslav MarchevskiTeaching & PhD PhD Students Jou An Chen, Tobias Alexandre Monnard, Xiafei Chang, Gauri Napoletano, Kerim Guseinov, Noémie Duc Courses Particle physics I PHYS-415 Presentation of particle properties, their symmetries and interactions.Introduction to quantum electrodynamics and to the Feynman rules. Particle physics: the flavour frontiers PHYS-471 This course will present experimental aspects of flavour physics primarily in the quark sector but also in the lepton sector and
