Friedhelm Christoph HummelExpertise
Stroke recovery Healthy Aging Motor Control Motor Learning Cognitive Control Neuroplasticity Non-invasive Brain Stimulation Structural and functional Neuroimaging Connectivity
Postal Address Campus Biotech
Defitech Chair of Clinical Neuroengineering Brain Mind Institute, SV Neuro X Institute, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL Campus Biotech Rm H4.3.132.084, 9, Chemin des Mines 1202 Geneva
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Maria Ploumitsakou, Simona Losacco, Fabienne Windel, Andrea Protani, Sta
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.
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.
Jocelyne BlochTeaching & PhD PhD Students Camille Marie Mélodie Frayssinhes Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Sabry Barlatey, Aasta Parin Gandhi
Tomislav MilekovicMission
Develop and advance brain-computer interfaces - devices that allow people with paralysis to control computers, robotic hands or their own paralyzed muscles directly by their brain activity - for the purpose of helping people with paralysis regain their lost abilities.
I obtained my dipl. ing. degree in Physics (equivalent to MSc in Physiscs) from the Faculty of Science of the Zagreb University in July 2006. During my undergraduate studies, I was awarded the Best Student award of the Department of Ph
Rolf GruetterAwards:
1999 Young Investigator Award Plenary Lectureship
, International Society for Neurochemistry
2011 Fellow
, ESMRMB
2011 Teaching Award
, Section Sciences de la Vie, EPFL
Alexander MathisAlexander studied pure mathematics with a minor in logic and theory of science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. For his PhD also at LMU, he worked on optimal coding approaches to elucidate the properties of grid cells. As a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Venkatesh N. Murthy at Harvard University and Prof. Matthias Bethge at Tuebingen AI, he decided to study olfactory behaviors such as odor-guided navigation, social behaviors and the cocktail party problem in mice. During this time, he increasingly got interested sensorimotor behaviors beyond olfaction and started working on proprioception, motor adaption, as well as computer vision tools for measuring animal behavior.
In his group, he is interested in elucidating how the brain gives rise to adaptive behavior. One of the major goals is to synthesize large datasets into computationally useful information. For those purposes, he develops algorithms and systems to analyze animal behavior (e.g. DeepLabCut), neural data, as well as creates experimentally testable computational models.
Ronan BoulicI come from Brittany, France, where I have completed my PhD degree in Computer Science in 1986 from the University of Rennes, France, at the INRIA-IRISA research institute. I also received the Habilitation degree from the University of Grenoble, France, in march 1995. I was hired in 1989 as First Assistant in the VRLAB, I became scientific collaborator, and senior researcher. I'm presently Senior Scientist (MER) and leader of the Immersive Interaction research Group (IIG). I'm co-author of around 150 research papers among which 43 appeared in international peer-reviewed journals. I have contributed to multiple SNF projects and EU projects. Please check iig.epfl.ch for more details.
Solaiman Shokur2019 - now : Senior Scientist, Translational neuroengineering Laboratory, EPFL(Geneva)
Team leader: CHRONOS project, a multi-center European project that aims at developing the first chronically implanted prosthetic hand for transradial amputee patients with bidirectional communication capabilities. NCCR Robotics: Bi-directional control of supernumerary limbs.2014-2019: Research Coordinator, AASDAP (São Paulo, Brazil) Responsible for both the scientific production and the clinical protocol at the AASDAP neurorehabilitation laboratory.
2013-2014: Postdoctoral associate, Walk again project, Insituto Santos Dumond. (Natal, RN, Brazil)Head of the engineering team in charge of the system integration. 2010-2012: Visiting scientist, Nicolelis Lab (Duke University).
Development and validation of a virtual-reality based brain-machine interface for rhesus monkeys.
2007 – 2010: Teaching assistant, Laboratory of Robotics Systems (EPFL)
Bernard SchneiderTeaching & PhD PhD Students Yesica Gloria, Christian Schellhaas Past EPFL PhD Students Vanessa Laversenne, Sameer Mohammad Khaleel Nazeeruddin, Emma Charlotta Källstig Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Philippe Guillaume Coune, Emilda Pino, Elisabeth Anne Dirren, Aurélien Lathuilière, Wojciech Janusz Bobela, Lu Zheng, Cylia Cloé Rochat Courses Methods: from disease models to therapy BIOENG-518 This course will describe methods underlying translational approaches from disease modeling an
Mackenzie MathisCenter for NeuroprostheticsEPFL ELLIS Unit Faculty MemberCenter for Intelligent Systems
Kathryn Hess BellwaldKathryn Hess Bellwald received her PhD from MIT in 1989 and held positions at the universities of Stockholm, Nice, and Toronto before moving to the EPFL.Her research focuses on algebraic topology and its applications, primarily in the life sciences, but also in materials science. She has published extensively on topics in pure algebraic topology including homotopy theory, operad theory, and algebraic K-theory. On the applied side, she has elaborated methods based on topological data analysis for high-throughput screening of nanoporous crystalline materials, classification and synthesis of neuron morphologies, and classification of neuronal network dynamics. She has also developed and applied innovative topological approaches to network theory, leading to a powerful, parameter-free mathematical framework relating the activity of a neural network to its underlying structure, both locally and globally.In 2016 she was elected to Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a distinguished speaker of the European Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2021 she gave an invited Public Lecture at the European Congress of Mathematicians. She has won several teaching prizes at EPFL, including the Crédit Suisse teaching prize and the Polysphère d’Or.
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.
