Jérémy GenoudTeaching & PhD PhD Students Constant Philippe Panisset Courses General physics : thermodynamics PHYS-106(b) Give the student the basic notions that will allow him or her to have a better understanding of physical phenomena, such as the mechanic of point masses. Acquire the capacity to analyse quantitatively the consequences of these effects with appropriate theoretical tools.
Simon Van MuldersTeaching & PhD PhD Students Daniel Perales Rios, Jan Jakub Frybes Courses General physics : mechanics PHYS-101(a) Give the student the basic notions that will allow him or her to have a better understanding of physical phenomena, such as the mechanic of point masses. Acquire the capacity to analyse quantitatively the consequences of these effects with appropriate theoretical tools.
Reinart Andreas J. CoosemansTeaching & PhD Courses General physics : mechanics PHYS-101(a) Give the student the basic notions that will allow him or her to have a better understanding of physical phenomena, such as the mechanic of point masses. Acquire the capacity to analyse quantitatively the consequences of these effects with appropriate theoretical tools.
Goutam KuriTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Shaileyee Bhattacharya Courses Effects of radiation on materials MSE-600 The purpose of this course is to provide the necessary background to understand the effects of irradiation on pure metals and on alloys used in the nuclear industry. The relation between the radiation-induced defects and the evolution of the mechanical properties is highlighted.
Brayden Graham MyersTeaching & PhD Courses General physics : mechanics (English) PHYS-101(en) Students will learn the principles of mechanics to enable a better understanding of physical phenomena, such as the kinematics and dyamics of point masses and solid bodies. Students will acquire the capacity to quantitatively analyze these effects with the appropriate theoretical tools.
Hans-Peter SeifertTeaching & PhD Courses Effects of radiation on materials MSE-600 The purpose of this course is to provide the necessary background to understand the effects of irradiation on pure metals and on alloys used in the nuclear industry. The relation between the radiation-induced defects and the evolution of the mechanical properties is highlighted.
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.
Johannes BertschTeaching & PhD PhD Students Sebastian Niedermeyer Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Aaron William Colldeweih Courses Effects of radiation on materials MSE-600 The purpose of this course is to provide the necessary background to understand the effects of irradiation on pure metals and on alloys used in the nuclear industry. The relation between the radiation-induced defects and the evolution of the mechanical properties is highlighted.
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.
Jonathan GravesProf. Jonathan P. Graves is a Senior Scientist at EPFL and Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK. He achieved first class joint honours in Electronic Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK in 1996. He completed his Ph.D. in Theoretical Mechanics from the University of Nottingham, UK, three years later in 1999. During his Ph.D. he was based in the Culham theory group of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, developing kinetic descriptions of the internal kink instability, and participating in deuterium-tritium experimental analysis in the Joint European Torus. After a short time in industry, and a postdoc at Nottingham University, he took a position at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL, becoming a Senior Scientist in 2014, and became an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York, UK, in 2020. In 2015 he became a member of the EUROfusion Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) and a member of the EUROfusion DEMO Technical Advisory Group. He is on the editorial board for the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, and in 2020 became Scientific Secretary of the Varenna-Lausanne International Workshop in Theory of Fusion Plasmas.
Matteo FaveroExpertise
Dynamic thermal comfort, Indoor environmental quality, Occupant-centric modelling, Human-building interaction, Multi-domain environmental exposure, Building physics, Building performance simulation, Thermal flexibility, Climate-adaptive buildings, Multilevel modelling, Statistical thinking, Causal thinking, Simulated-data experimentation.
Matteo Favero is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He is currently a member of the Human-Oriented Bu
Olivier SauterTeaching & PhD PhD Students Cassandre Ekta Contré, Antonia Frank, Peizheng Zhang, Jean-Pierre Thomas Svantner, Cristina Venturini, Cosmas Quirin Lorenz Heiss, Daniel Perales Rios, Viacheslav Bochkarev, Jan Jakub Frybes, Paul Véronique Guillaume Devianne Past EPFL PhD Students Clemente Angioni, Petri Nikkola, Alberto Bottino, Andrei Martynov, Emiliano Fable, Costanza Zucca, Federico Felici, Dávid Wágner, Doohyun Kim, Anna Teplukhina, Mengdi Kong, Francesco Carpanese, Simon Van Mulders, Stefano Marchioni, F
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.
Frédéric MilaExpertise
Condensed matter theory, strongly correlated systems, frustrated and quantum magnetism, tensor networks
Mission
Perform research in condensed matter theory, whenever possible in collaboration with experimentalists at EPFL and throughout the world
Current Work
- Magnetism on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice- Tensor network approach to 2D strongly correlated systems- Thermal properties of 2D frustrated quantum magnets- Exotic phases of quantum one-dimensional models
Since 2003 Full Professor at EPFL (
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.
Kenan ZhangDr. Kenan Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the école polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and leads the Laboratory for Human-Oriented Mobility Eco-system (HOMES). Her research focuses on the mathematical modeling, optimization and operations management of urban transportation systems, with special interests in emerging mobility services and technologies.Kenan obtained her BSc. in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University and MSc. in Architecture-Engineering-Construction Management (AECM)
Dominique BonvinDominique Bonvin is Professor and Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory of EPFL. He received his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from ETH Zürich, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked in the field of process control for the Sandoz Corporation in Basel and with the Systems Engineering Group of ETH Zürich. He joined the EPFL in 1989, where his current research interests include modeling, control and optimization of dynamic systems. He served as Director of the Automatic Control Laboratory for the periods 1993-97, 2003-2007 and again since 2012, Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1995-97 and Dean of Bachelor and Master Studies at EPFL for the period 2004-2011.
Jérôme ChenalExpertise
Urban DesignUrban PlanningUrban ManagementPublic SpaceHousingDevelopment StudiesVisual Anthropology
Mission
Director of CEAT Director of Excellence in Africa Center Affiliate professor at UM6P
Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Stéphanie Hasler, Rémi Jaligot, Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda, Martí Bosch Padrós, Andrea Salmi, Vitor Pessoa Colombo, Akuto Akpedze Konou, Rim Mrani Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Marc Antoine Messer, Alexandre Rigal Courses Urban planning in the South PE
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
