Benoît Jean Dominique FerrariDr. Benoît J.D. Ferrari studied Biochemistry and Biology and completed his PhD in Ecotoxicology at the University of Lorraine (Metz, France) in 2000. After several years at the University of Geneva (Forel F.A. Institute, Geneva, Switzerland; 2002-2008) and Irstea (Formerly Cemagref, Lyon, France; 2000-2002 and 2008-2013), he joined the Swiss Centre of Applied Ecotoxicology (Centre Ecotox Eawag/EPFL) in October 2013 as group leader of the soil and sediment ecotoxicology group at Lausanne. During his different mandates, he was implied as (co-)proponent in different research projects supported e.g. by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the French National Research Agency or the European Framework Programme for Research. His main areas of interest cover the ecodynamic of contaminants and their impact on the ecophysiology of organisms. Particularly, he is involved in 1) the development of exposure and effect indicators to evaluate the chemical stresses, 2) the integration of such indicators in laboratory- and field-based approaches to assess the quality of aquatic ecosystems, 3) the development of adapted bioassays for active biomonitoring, and 4) the transfer of such ecotoxicological tools and approaches towards end-users.
Régis Lionel VivienExpertise
Classical systematics (aquatic oligochaetes)Aquatic ecologyMolecular systematicsSediment ecotoxicology
Simon Nessim HeneinBorn in 1973 and of Egyptian-Swiss nationality, Simon Henein grew up in Cairo. He obtained an engineering degree at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 1996 and went on to complete his doctorate at the EPFL in 2000. In 2001, he published the book “Conception des guidages flexibles” which has become a reference in precision engineering. He then joined the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique (CSEM), Neuchatel, Switzerland, where he conceived and developed mechanisms for robotic, aerospace, medical and watchmaking applications. He pursued his research career at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Villigen, Switzerland, where he developed instruments for the Swiss Light Source Synchrotron (SLS). Since November 1st, 2012, he is associate professor in microengineering at the EPFL, holder of the Patek Philippe Chair and director of the Micromechanical and horological design laboratory (Instant-Lab).
Ianina AltshulerTeaching & PhD PhD Students Haohua He, Anna Dukat, Laureen Sarah Ahlers, Anastasiia Kosolapova, Grace Emma Marsh Courses Biology ENV-103 This course will cover the fundamental principles governing life and the living world. Topics will include the diversity of living organisms, cellular biology, genetics, evolution, and ecology. This course provides a foundation in biology, fostering critical thinking & analytical skills. EESS - CESS Seminar Course - option 1 (FALL) ENV-630(a)
Alexandre ButtlerI am a honorary professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne - EPFL. Up to 2019, I was a joint-professor between EPFL (Head of the laboratory of Ecological Systems - ECOS) and the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL for Forest, Snow and Landscape (Head of the research group Pasture Woodlands and Wetlands) and head of the Site WSL-Lausanne. I was also professor at the laboratory of Chrono-Environnement (UMR CNRS 6249) of the University of Franche-Comté, Besançon (France). I am author or co-author of over 160 papers in international ISI cited peer-reviewed journals.
Amin KaboliDr. Amin Kaboli is an external lecturer for at the Mechanical Engineering Section at EPFL and teaches Production Management (ME-419), Continuous Improvement (ME-498) to graduate students and Digital Supply Chain, Innovation and Digitization, and Sustainable Change Leadership to business executives and managers at International Institute for the Management of Logistics and Supply Chain (IML).
Amin supports many organizations ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to entrepreneurial firms and industries as diverse as Watch, Consumer Goods, Food and Beverage, MedTech, and Pharma. He obtained his Ph.D. in Manufacturing Systems & Robotics, specialized in Supply Chain Management from EPFL. You can watch his TEDx talk on “Leading Change Consciously” here. TEDx talk here.
Mihai Adrian IonescuAdrian M. Ionescu is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland. He received the B.S./M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania and the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 1989 and 1997, respectively. He has held staff and/or visiting positions at LETI-CEA, Grenoble, France and INP Grenoble, France and Stanford University, USA, in 1998 and 1999. Dr. Ionescu has published more than 600 articles in international journals and conferences. He received many Best Paper Awards in international conferences, the Annual Award of the Technical Section of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1994 and the Blondel Medal in 2009 for contributions to the progress in engineering sciences in the domain of electronics. He is the 2013 recipient of the IBM Faculty Award in Engineering. He served the IEDM and VLSI conference technical committees and was the Technical Program Committee (Co)Chair of ESSDERC in 2006 and 2013. He is a member of the SATW. He is director of the Laboratory of Micro/Nanoelectronic Devices (NANOLAB).
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.
