Bruno HerbelinSince 10/09 - Scientist Laboratory of cognitive neuroscience Brain & Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 06/12 - 10/19 Deputy Director Center for Neuroprosthetics École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 11/05 - 09/09 Assistant Professor Aalborg University Esbjerg Institute of Technology & Copenhagen Institute of Technology, Denmark. 07/01 - 09/05 Research assistant PhD student Virtual Reality Laboratory School of Computer and Communications, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
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.
Hervé LissekExpertise
Acoustics and audio engineering, Electroacoustics.Room acoustics.Active noise control.Acoustic metamaterials.Assisted reverberation.Psychoacoustics.Sound spatialization
Expertise
Acoustics and audio engineering, Electroacoustics.Room acoustics.Active noise control.Acoustic metamaterials.Assisted reverberation.Psychoacoustics.Sound spatialization
Mission
Head of the Acoustic Group at the Laboratory of Wave Engineering LWE. Research topics :Active Electroacoustic Resonators: turning conventional lou
Katrin BeyerSince 2017 Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), EPFL. Head of the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (EESD) Laboratory
2010-2017 Assistant Professor, EPFL.
2008-2010 Post-doctoral researcher, ETH Zürich.
2003-2007 Ph.D., Roseschool / Università di Pavia, Italy.
2001-2003 Ove Arup & Partners, Advanced Technology and Research Group, London.
2001 Diploma, Civil engineering, ETH Zürich.
Cécile HardebolleCurrent work
Responsible information systems (https://go.epfl.ch/digitalethics), ethical skills Jupyter notebooks for education (https://go.epfl.ch/notebooks), digital skills, computational thinking Transversal/professional skillsEngineering design skillsFlipped classrooms Project-based learning
Education PhD | Computer Science 2006 – 2008 Université Paris-Sud XI, France Directed by Prof. Guy Vidal-Naquet MSc | Electrical Engineering, major in Computer and Inf Volkan CevherVolkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
Devis TuiaI come from Ticino and studied in Lausanne, between UNIL and EPFL. After my PhD at UNIL in remote sensing, I was postdoc in Valencia (Spain), Boulder (CO) and EPFL, working on model adaptation and prior knowledge integration in machine learning. In 2014 I became Research Assistant Professor at University of Zurich, where I started the 'multimodal remote sensing' group. In 2017, I joined Wageningen University (NL), where I was professor of the GeoInformation Science and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Since 2020, I joined EPFL Valais, to start the ECEO lab, working at the interface between Earth observation, machine learning and environmental sciences.
Bruno LemaitrePersonal Webpage
http://brunolemaitre.ch
Personal Webpage http://brunolemaitre.ch
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Blandine Ribotta, Yao Tian, Désirée Popelka, Prince Kumar Sah, Siqi Wang, Kenan Krakovic, Nathan Alexandre Klotz Past EPFL PhD Students Sveta Chakrabarti, Olivier Binggeli, Jeremy Keith Herren, Juan Camilo Paredes Escobar, Alfred Chng, Maroun Bou Sleiman, Jan Paul Dudzic, Mario Gonzalo Garcia Arraez, Claudia Melcarne, Alice Marra, Bianca Marie Petrignani, Mark Austin Hanson, Alexia Laurie Carboni Fosco Bernasconi2014-Present:
post-doc at the EPFL, Laboratory of Congitive Neuroscience.
2012-2014:
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Charité University Medicine, Berlin, Germany.
2012:
Postdoctoral Research Associate,Psychiatric University Hospital (PUK), Zurich, Switzerland.
2008-2011:
PhD in Neurosciences,Lemanic Neurosciences Doctoral School, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, Lausanne University, Switzerland.
2007-2008:
Master in Medical Biology,Faculty of Biology & Medicine, Lausanne University,Switzerland.
Roland John TormeyI am a sociologist and learning scientist researching and teaching on engineering education. I'm particularly focused on the roles of emotion and self-regulation in engineering teaching and learning. My profile is accessible here.
