Michaela HirschmannTeaching & PhD PhD Students Patrick Hirling, Jonathan Petersson, Lucie Scharré Courses Astrophysics III : galaxy formation and evolution PHYS-465 Galaxy formation & evolution is about studying how galaxies in our Universe come into existence, how they evolve and what shapes their properties. This course describes the observational facts of galaxies and the various processes of galaxy evolution as seen from theoretical/numerical models. General physics : thermodynamics (English) P
Jean-Paul Richard KneibExpertise
Cosmology, Gravitational Lensing, Redshift Survey, First Galaxies, Cluster of Galaxies, Fiber-positioner robotic system, Radio Astronomy, Space Sustainibility
Current work
- Former Principal investigator of the SDSS-IV eBOSS project. This is an international project assembling more than 150 participants located mainly in Europe, USA and China. This project will observe 1.5 million galaxy and quasars over 2014-2020 to accurately measure the expansion history of the Universe. * Member of the DESI co
Oliver MüllerEducation B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Physics | 2008 – 2014 University of Basel Ph.D. in Astronomy | 2014 – 2018 University of Basel Professionals experiences SNSF Postdoctoral Fellow 2018–2021 University of StrasbourgSenior Data Analyst 2021–2022 Google, SwitzerlandSNSF Ambizione Fellow 2022–2022 EPFL
Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Nick Heesters
Awards Amerbach Prize University of Basel 2019 Edith Alice Müller Award Swiss Society for Astrophysics a
Thibault Adrien KuntzerTeaching & PhD Courses Space mission design and operations EE-585 Space mission design and operations takes you through the necessary concepts to understand a mission mission, from planning to actually flying the spacecraft. We will focus on concepts and see many examples ranging historical probes to very topical missions.
David Richard HarveyExpertise
CosmologyDark MatterGalaxy ClustersStrong Gravitational LensingWeak Gravitational Lensing
I am an observational and theoretical astrophysicist at EPFL. My main area of research is dark matter and trying to understand its properties and dynamics. I love to use deep learning in my work and understand how fondation models and generative AI can help us understand the Universe. I am a member of Euclid and ARRAKIHS and the lead of the self interacting dark matter Key Project in Euclid. Outside of my r
Yves RevazYves Revaz is a scientist at LASTRO/EPFL. After successful studies in physics at EPFL, he accomplished his PhD entitled: "Dynamics of external regions of spiral galaxies and constraints on the dark matter", at the Geneva Observatory in the galactic dynamics group of Prof. D. Pfenniger. He then moved to the Paris Observatory to work at the LERMA (Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics) under the supervision of Prof. F. Combes on the understanding of cooling flows in galaxy clusters. He joined LASTRO at EPFL in 2007, where, in collaboration with Pascale Jablonka, he developed a new TreePM/SPH chemo-dynamical code called GEAR, designed to study the chemical evolution of galaxies. His current main research focus on the evolution of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and their link with the cosmology. Yves Revaz is also the author of pNbody, a parallelized python toolbox designed to manipulate large N-body systems.
Antoine Philippe Jacques RocherExpertise
I am a cosmologist specialising in the analysis of large structures in the Universe. My research aims to study the link between galaxies and dark matter in order to test the validity of the cosmological models. I use data from large galaxy surveys, notably those from the DESI. I develop innovative simulation based inference techniques to fully exploit the potential of observational data.
Formation Towards a comprehensive interpretation of the galaxy-halo connection for emission-line galaxies i
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.
Eduardo SanchezTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Christian Iseli, Emeka Mosanya, Jean-Michel Puiatti, Dominik Madon, Jacques-Olivier Haenni, Ralph Hoffmann, Yann Thoma, Andres Upegui, Fabien Vannel
