Laurent Gilles Marie VuillonTeaching & PhD Courses Data visualization COM-480 Understanding why and how to present complex data interactively in an effective manner has become a crucial skill for any data scientist. In this course, you will learn how to design, judge, build and present your own interactive data visualizations.
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)
Michaël UnserExpertise
Image Processing, Medical Imaging, Biological Imaging, Wavelets, Splines, Multiresolution
Michael Unser is Full Professor with EPFL’s school of Engineering and the academic director of EPFL's Center for Imaging, Lausanne, Switzerland. His primary areas of investigation are signal processing, biomedical imaging and applied functional analysis. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to sampling theory, wavelets, the use of splines for image processing, stochastic processes,
Roger HerschRoger D. Hersch is professor of Computer Science and head of the Peripheral Systems Laboratory at EPFL. He received his engineering degree from ETHZ in 1975, worked in industry from 1975 to 1980, and obtained his PhD degree from EPFL in 1985. He directed the widely known
Visible Human Web Server project
, which offers a number of services for the visualization of human anatomy.
His current research focuses on color reproduction, spectral color prediction models, moiré imaging, and visual document security. Recent achievements include the PhotoProtect technology, which incorporates text as chromatic differences in order to protect identity photographs (Swiss driving license), microstructure imaging, which is used by railways companies (SNCF, RENFE) and festival organizers (Paleo) to print tickets at home and the band moire imaging technology for the protection of security documents.
Edoardo ChiarottiTeaching & PhD Courses Data Science & Causal Inference for Sustainability MGT-499 This class explores key climate questions through data. Students will learn to collect, clean, and analyze data, apply causal methods using Python, and communicate insights clearly. With a focus on sustainability, the course builds skills to avoid pitfalls and draw meaningful conclusions.
Stéphane JoostExpertise
Geographic Information Science and spatial statisticsMolecular ecology, Landscape genomics, Seascape genomicsSpatial epidemiology, Health geographics
Publications Publications- List of publications
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Marco André Vieira Ruas, Manon Laetitia Pribille, Martine Valérie Besse Past EPFL PhD Students Estelle Rochat, Solange Catherine Gaillard, Oliver Michele Selmoni, Anaïs Ladoy, Annie Sandrine Guillaume Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Sylvie Stucki, Kevin Leempoel, Martí
Martin Alfred GrandjeanExpertise
Digital Humanities, History, Digital History, Contemporary History, Data Visualisation, Social Network Analysis
Teaching & PhD Courses Press and digital history I HUM-474 Combining digital technology and history, this course offers a fresh approach to media history. By exploring digitized press archives using digital tools, students will learn to critically analyze massive amounts of data from the past. Press and digital history II HUM-475 Combining digital technolo
Damien ChalletTeaching & PhD Courses Financial big data FIN-525 The course introduces modern methods to acquire, clean, and analyze large quantities of financial data efficiently. The second part expands on how to apply these techniques and robust statistics to financial analysis, in particular to intraday data and investment strategies.
Quentin GalleaTeaching & PhD Courses Data Science & Causal Inference for Sustainability MGT-499 This class explores key climate questions through data. Students will learn to collect, clean, and analyze data, apply causal methods using Python, and communicate insights clearly. With a focus on sustainability, the course builds skills to avoid pitfalls and draw meaningful conclusions. Economics for challenging times MGT-494 This course analyzes socio-economic issues related to poverty, inequ
Pascal FuaPascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).
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.
Mayssam Assem NehmeTeaching & PhD Courses Exploratory data analysis in environmental health ENV-444 This course teaches how to apply exploratory spatial data analysis to health information. Teaching focuses on the role of GIS and spatial statistics in spatial epidemiology. It proposes a context to investigate the relationship between health, quality of life, and environmental characteristics.
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.
Martin Alois RohrmeierTeaching & PhD PhD Students Joris Monnet, Marina Borsodi-Benson, Xinyi Guan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Zeng Ren Past EPFL PhD Students Fabian Claude Moss, Daniel Harasim, Christoph Finkensiep, Johannes Hentschel, Gabriele Cecchetti, Shuxin Meng Courses Digital musicology DH-401 This course will introduce students to the central topics in digital musicology and core theoretical approaches and methods. In the practical part, students will carry out a practical project. Musical theory and creativity
Sacha FriedliDiploma of Physics, Université de Lausanne, 1999
Phd, Institut de Physique Théorique, EPFL, 1999-2004
Post-doc, IMPA (Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada), Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2004-2006
Adjunct professor, Departamento de Matemática (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), 2006-2016
Collaborateur Scientifique, Cours de Mathématiques Spéciales, EPFL, Lausanne, 2016-
Simon BossoneyTeaching & PhD Courses Algèbre linéaire et géométrie (pour MAN) PREPA-032(a) We present the fundamental notions of linear algebra in the geometric context where they emerged. We will therefore emphasize the dimensions 2 and 3, and insist on the visualisation of classical objects and operations in the plane and in the 3D space. Analysis I (for CMS) PREPA-003(a) This first semester class is an introduction to the basis of differential calculus. Analysis II (for CMS)
Mathieu HuruguenTeaching & PhD Courses Algèbre linéaire et géométrie (pour MAN) PREPA-032(a) We present the fundamental notions of linear algebra in the geometric context where they emerged. We will therefore emphasize the dimensions 2 and 3, and insist on the visualisation of classical objects and operations in the plane and in the 3D space. Analysis II (for CMS) PREPA-005(a) This class focus on the studies of special functions : trigonometric, logarithmic and exponential functions. Anal
Johan AuwerxJohan Auwerx is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he occupies the Nestle Chair in Energy Metabolism. Dr. Auwerx has been using molecular physiology and systems genetics to understand metabolism in health, aging and disease. Much of his work focused on understanding how diet, exercise and hormones control metabolism through changing the expression of genes by altering the activity of transcription factors and their associated cofactors. His work was instrumental for the development of agonists of nuclear receptors - a particular class of transcription factors - into drugs, which now are used to treat high blood lipid levels, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Auwerx was amongst the first to recognize that transcriptional cofactors, which fine-tune the activity of transcription factors, act as energy sensors/effectors that influence metabolic homeostasis. His research validated these cofactors as novel targets to treat metabolic diseases, and spurred the clinical use of natural compounds, such as resveratrol, as modulators of these cofactor pathways.
Johan Auwerx was elected as a member of EMBO in 2003 and is the recipient of a dozen of international scientific prizes, including the Danone International Nutrition Award, the Oskar Minkowski Prize, and the Morgagni Gold Medal. His work is highly cited by his peers with a h-factor of over 100. He is an editorial board member of several journals, including Cell Metabolism, Molecular Systems Biology, The EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, Cell, and Science. Dr. Auwerx co-founded a handful of biotech companies, including Carex, PhytoDia, and most recently Mitobridge, and has served on several scientific advisory boards.
Dr. Auwerx received both his MD and PhD in Molecular Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Pierre VandergheynstPierre Vandergheynst received the M.S. degree in physics and the Ph.D. degree in mathematical physics from the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. He was Assistant Professor at EPFL (2002-2007), where he is now a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer and Communication Sciences. As of 2015, Prof. Vandergheynst serves as EPFL’s Vice-Provost for Education. His research focuses on harmonic analysis, sparse approximations and mathematical data processing in general with applications covering signal, image and high dimensional data processing, computer vision, machine learning, data science and graph-based data processing. He was co-Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing (2002-2006), Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2007-2011), the flagship journal of the signal processing community and currently serves as Associate Editor of Computer Vision and Image Understanding and SIAM Imaging Sciences. He has been on the Technical Committee of various conferences, serves on the steering committee of the SPARS workshop and was co-General Chairman of the EUSIPCO 2008 conference. Pierre Vandergheynst is the author or co-author of more than 70 journal papers, one monograph and several book chapters. He has received two IEEE best paper awards. Professor Vandergheynst is a laureate of the Apple 2007 ARTS award and of the 2009-2010 De Boelpaepe prize of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium.
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.
