Giordano FaviExpertise
Research: Non associative Algebra, Category Theory, Triangulated Category Theory, Balmer-Witt Theory, Quadratic Forms in Characteristic 2, Galois Theory, Essential dimension, Tensor Triangular GeometryTeaching: Algebra (Associative, Linear, Commutative or not), Differential Calculus , Algebraic Geometry/Topology, etc.
Current work
Teaching: My current work at EPFL is half time dedicated to teaching mathematics for 1st year students. It is very important to give satisfactory introductory courses
Sofia Charlotta OlhedeI am a professor of Statistics at EPFL. I did my PhD in Mathematics at Imperial College London, and graduated in 2003. I was an assistant professor (lecturer) at Imperial College London 2002-2006, and an associate professor (senior lecturer) 2006-2007. In 2007 I moved to University College London and became a full professor. I moved to EPFL in 2019, and in 2018 I became an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow with citation “For seminal contributions to the theory and application of large and heteroge
Damir FilipovicDamir Filipovic holds the Swissquote Chair in Quantitative Finance and is Swiss Finance Institute Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Prior to this, he was head of the Vienna Institute of Finance and professor at the University of Vienna. He previously held the chair of financial and insurance mathematics at the University of Munich, and he was on the faculty of Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from ETH Zurich in 2000. Damir Filipovic worked as a scientific consultant for the Swiss Federal Office of Private Insurance from 2003 to 2004. There he co-developed the Swiss Solvency Test, which defines the regulatory capital requirement for all Swiss based insurance companies and groups. He is on the editorial board of several academic journals. His research interests include the term structure of interest rates, credit and volatility risk, quantitative methods in risk management, and stochastic processes. His papers have been published in a variety of academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, Mathematical Finance, Finance and Stochastics, and the Annals of Applied Probability. He is the author of a textbook titled Term-Structure Models.
Clément Hongler2006: B.Sc. Math, EPFL2008: M.Sc. Math, EPFL2010: Ph.D. Math, Université de Genève2010-2014: Ritt Assistant Professor, Columbia University2014-2018 Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, EPFL2019-present: Associate Professor, EPFL
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]
Mats Julius StensrudTeaching & PhD PhD Students Ignacio Gonzalez Perez, Gellért Géza Perényi, Lorenzo Gasparollo, Julien David Laurendeau Past EPFL PhD Students Matias Janvin, Amit Sawant Courses Causal thinking MATH-352 This course will give a unified presentation of modern methods for causal inference. We focus on concepts, and we will present examples and ideas from various scientific disciplines, including medicine, computer science, engineering, economics and epidemiology. Probability and statistics (
Luciano Andres AbriataExpertise
Protein NMRNMR of paramagnetic systemsMetalloproteinsBiomolecular SpectroscopyStructural BiologyStructural BioinformaticsMolecular Modeling
ResearchPapers Link to Google Scholar
Teaching & PhD Courses Basic and advanced NMR - Level 1 A (EPFL) CH-601(x) Basic theoretical and experimental aspects of NMR will be taught. Students will be familarized with modern NMR spectrometers. Basic and advanced NMR - Level 2 (EPFL) CH-703 The goal is to give a sound theoretical an
Vassily HatzimanikatisDr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).
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.
