Hannes Markus PeterCurrent work
I am a microbial ecologist and mainly interested in factors shaping bacterial communities and functioning in freshwater ecosystems. I use combinations of field observations, experiments and molecular techniques to test hypotheses regarding the assembly of microbial communities, the influence of environmental variability and relationships between diversity and funcioning. I enjoy working in alpine environments, which are sensitive to climate change and represent excellent model systems.
Teaching
Linda MarchandTeaching & PhD Courses Applied statistics MATH-516 The course will provide an overview of everyday challenges in applied statistics through case studies. Students will learn how to use core statistical methods and their extensions, and will use computational and problem-solving tools to provide reproducible solutions for the problems presented. Bioinformatic Analysis of RNA-sequencing (Fall) BIO-693(a) Bioinformatic Analysis of RNA-sequencing (Spring) BIO-693(b)
Philippe MüllhauptExpertise
Nonlinear Control (Geometry and Algebra)Classical DynamicsRoboticsStatistics
Mission
Provide rigorous technical and scientific training in nonlinear control, classical mechanics, and statistical theory
Current Work
Research and teaching in the fields of control theory, statistics, dynamical systems, and general mechanics.
Philippe Mullhaupt received his Diplôme d Education Ing�nieur | Electricit� 1993 – 1993 EPFL DEA | Automatique et Traitement du Signal 199
Sabine SüsstrunkProf. Dr. Sabine Süsstrunk leads the Image and Visual Representation Lab in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL since 1999. From 2015-2020, she was also the first Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), College of Humanities (CdH). Her main research areas are in computational photography, computational imaging, color image processing and computer vision, machine learning, and computational image quality and aesthetics. Sabine has authored and co-authored over 200 publications, of which 7 have received best paper/demo awards, and holds over 10 patents. Sabine served as chair and/or committee member in many international conferences on image processing, computer vision, and image systems engineering. She is President of the Swiss Science Council SSC, Founding Member and Member of the Board (President 2014-2018) of the EPFL-WISH (Women in Science and Humanities) Foundation, Member of the Board of the SRG SSR (Swiss Radio and Television Corporation), and Member of the Board of Largo Films. She received the IS&T/SPIE 2013 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award for her contributions to color imaging, computational photography, and image quality, and the 2018 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman and the 2020 EPFL AGEPoly IC Polysphere Awards for excellence in teaching. Sabine is a Fellow of IEEE and IS&T.
Stephan MorgenthalerACADEMIC POSITIONS
Professor of Applied Statistics, EPFL, 1988-present
Associate Professor of Statistics, Yale University, 1987-1988
Assistant Professor of Statistics, Yale University, 1983-1987
Instructor of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983-1984
Gregor JotzuGregor Jotzu is heading the Dynamic Quantum Materials Laboratory (DQML) at EPFL. His research concerns the control of quantum materials using intense low-frequency laser pulses and the dynamics of order formation in strongly correlated quantum systems.After reading physics at the University of Oxford, he became the 2009/2010 Michael von Clemm Fellow at Harvard University. He received his doctorate from ETH Zurich, where he studied quantum magnetism and driving-induced order using ultracold atoms in optical
Alexandre TerrierExpertise
BiomechanicsJoint biomechanicsMecano-biologyOrthopaedic researchPatient-specific modellingContinuum mechanicsFinite Element AnalysisExperimental testingStatistical analyses
Expertise
BiomechanicsJoint biomechanicsMecano-biologyOrthopaedic researchPatient-specific modellingContinuum mechanicsFinite Element AnalysisExperimental testingStatistical analyses
Mission
Develop patient-specific models of human joints and their replacement, in parallel with a database of patients, in order to test statistic
Hervé BourlardTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Astrid Hagen, Katrin Weber, Todd Stephenson, Jitendra Ajmera, Shajith Ikbal, Mathew Magimai Doss, Mohamed Faouzi Benzeghiba, Mark Barnard, Yann Rodriguez, Hemant Misra, Christos Dimitrakakis, Guillaume Lathoud, Alexei Pozdnoukhov, Agnès Just, Mikaela Keller, Norman Hoon Thian Poh, Dong Zhang, Florent Monay Michaud, Pedro Manuel Da Silva Quelhas, Kevin Smith, Silèye Oumar Ba, Bertrand Mesot, Hamed Ketabdar, David Grangier, Guillermo Aradilla, Jean-François Paiement, Nico
André AnjosExpertise
Reproducible ResearchPattern RecognitionImage ProcessingMachine LearningBiometrics
Short bio
André Anjos received his Ph.D. degree in signal processing in 2006 studying the application of neural nets and statistical methods for particle recognition in the context of High-Energy Physics experiments at Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland. He joined the Idiap Research Institute in 2010 where he works with biosignal processing and biometrics applications. He currently heads the Biosignal Proces
Rajita Ramesh ChandakExpertise
Nonparametric estimation, statistical inference, theory of machine learning
Teaching & PhD Courses Nonparametric estimation and inference MATH-524 Nonparametric models are used to identify a wide range of relationships within data. This course gives a graduate-level overview of nonparametric statistical estimation and inference theory. Statistical inference MATH-562 Inference from the particular to the general based on probability models is central to the statistica
Ambrogio FasoliAmbrogio FASOLI was born on November 10, 1964, in Milano, Italy. After a classical high school diploma (Maturità Classica) and graduation from the University of Milano, with the degree of Dottore in Fisica, he obtained his Phd at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) with a thesis on chaos in wave-particle interactions in plasmas, which was awarded the Best EPFL Thesis prize, in 1993. He then moved to the JET Joint Undertaking, the largest worlds fusion device, near Oxford, UK, to investigate Alfvén waves and burning plasma physics. In 1995-1996 he took a sabbatical leave, visiting several Universities and Research Institutes in Europe and in the USA, including three months at General Atomics in San Diego. In 1996-1997, during a second period at JET, he participated in the fusion power worlds record experiments in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas at JET. In 1997 he was nominated Assistant Professor in MIT Physics Department, where he led a basic plasma physics group and the international collaboration between MIT and JET. In 2001 Ambrogio FASOLI was nominated Assistant Professor of Physics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Professeur Boursier of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He became member of CRPP Directorate and took the leadership of CRPP basic plasma physics group and of the TCV tokamak, one of the major fusion experiments worldwide. At European level he was scientific coordinator for JET experiments, spokesperson for multi-machine experiments in the frame of International Tokamak Physics Activities, and Project Leader for a JET Enhancement project. In 2005 he became Associate Professor of Physics with tenure at EPFL, then member of EFDA Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and of the Steering Committee of the Association EURATOM-Swiss Confederation. From 2006 he was also Deputy Director, then from 2007 Executive Director of CRPP and from 2008 Full Professor of Physics at EPFL. For a number of years he was the Chair of the EPFL Physics Strategic Committee and a member of the Directorate of the EPFL School of Sciences. Since the summer of 2014 Professor FASOLI was the sole Director of CRPP. He now represents Switzerland in the EUROfusion General Assembly and Bureau, and in the Governing Board for Fusion for Energy. He is member of the EUROfusion DEMO project Board, of the Scientific Board of the Helmotz Virtual Institute on Advanced Microwave Diagnostics, of the European Delegation for the Cooperation between Euratom and the Government of India in Fusion Energy Research, of the European Consortium for the development of the ITER gyratron (EGYC), and participates to numerous international review panels. He chairs the FuseNet Academic Council, the International Advisory Panel for the Laboratory of Excellence Plas@Par in the Sorbonne Universities, the European Consortium for the construction of the ITER microwave Upper Launcher (ECHUL), and the Promotion Committee of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. He is one the three European representatives in the International Tokamak Physics Activities Coordinating Committee, advising ITER, and the Editor-in-Chief of the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion. Since January 2019, Ambrogio Fasoli is the Chair of the General Assembly, i.e. the president of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for Development of Fusion Energy. Professor FASOLI is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and since 2001 a Visiting Professor at MIT Physics Department. He is the Director of the Swiss Plasma Center.
Vivek SubramanianTeaching & PhD PhD Students Giovanni Ruffolo, Giada Romano, Sanjay Manoharan, Kyle Haas, Claude Dahan, Biruktait Ayele Lemecho, Yagmur Ceren Alatas, Tugçe Delipinar Past EPFL PhD Students Amin Hodaei, Mustafa Mohieldin Fadlelmula Fadlelseed Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Mohammad Jafarpour Courses Organic and printed electronics MICRO-505 This course addresses the implementation of organic and printed electronics technologies using large area manufacturing techniques. It will provide
Olivier SchneiderAfter his thesis defense in particle physics in 1989 at University of Lausanne, Olivier Schneider joins LBL, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (California), to work on the CDF experiment at the Tevatron in Fermilab (Illinois), first as a research fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and later as a post-doc at LBL. He participates in the construction and commissioning of the first silicon vertex detector to operate successfully at a hadron collider; this detector enabled the discovery of the sixth quark, named "top". Since 1994, he comes back to Europe and participates in the ALEPH experiment at CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider, as CERN fellow and then as CERN scientific staff. He specializes in heavy flavour physics. In 1998, he becomes associate professor at University of Lausanne, then extraordinary professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2003, and finally full professor at EPFL in 2010. Having worked since 1997 on the preparation of the LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which started operation in 2009, he is now analyzing the first data. He also contributes since 2001 to the exploitation of the data recorded at the Belle experiment (KEK laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan). These two experiments study mainly the decays of hadrons containing a b quark, as well CP violation, i.e. the non-invariance under the symmetry between matter and antimatter.
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.
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
Guido HaefeliTeaching & PhD PhD Students Federico Ronchetti, Gauri Napoletano Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Axel Kuonen, Olivier Göran Girard, Carina Trippl Courses Particle detection PHYS-440 The course will cover the physics of particle detectors. It will introduce the experimental techniques used in nuclear and particle physics. The lecture includes the interaction of particles with matter, scintillators, gas detectors, silicon detectors, detectors for particle ID and photo-detectors.
Dominique PiolettiDominique Pioletti received his Master in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 1992. He pursued his education in the same Institution and obtained his PhD in biomechanics in 1997. He developed original constitutive laws taking into account viscoelasticity in large deformations. Then he spent two years at UCSD as post-doc fellow acquiring know-how in cell and molecular biology. He was interested in particular to gene expression of bone cells in contact to orthopedic implant. In April 2006, Dominique Pioletti was appointed Assistant Professor tenure-track at the EPFL and is director of the Laboratory of Biomechanical Orthopedics. His research topics include biomechanics and tissue engineering of musculo-skeletal tissues; mechano-transduction in bone; development of orthopedic implant as drug delivery system. Since 2013, he has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
