Rolf GruetterAwards:
1999 Young Investigator Award Plenary Lectureship
, International Society for Neurochemistry
2011 Fellow
, ESMRMB
2011 Teaching Award
, Section Sciences de la Vie, 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.
Yves PerriardYves Perriard was born in Lausanne in 1965. He received the M. Sc. in Microengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne (EPFL) in 1989 and the Ph D. degree in 1992. Co-founder of Micro-Beam SA, he was CEO of this company involved in high precision electric drive. Senior lecturer from 1998 and professor since 2003, he is currently director of Laboratory of Integrated Actuators. His research interests are in the field of new actuator design and associated electronic devices. In 2009, he is appointed Vice-Director of the Microengineering Institute in Neuchâtel until 2011. In 2013 the Federal Council has named him the the CTI commission in Bern. In 2014 he is appointed guest professor at Zhejiang University in China. In 2017, the lab is granted by the Werner Siemens Foundation of an amount of 12 millions CHF in order to set up a new Center for Artificial Muscules. Since 2018, he is Expert with Innosuisse, the new Swiss Innovation Agency. http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=fr&user=V2onuO8AAAAJ https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-12-million-franc-donation-to-create-a-center-for/ Hubert GiraultEducation: 1979 - Engineering diploma from Grenoble Institute of Technology. FRANCE. 1982 - PhD- Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton. Thesis entitled : Interfacial studies using drop image processing techniques. Positions : 1982 - 1984 SERC Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1984 - 1985 CNRS Research Fellow. University of Southampton. 1985 - 1992 Lecturer in Physical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh. 1992 - Professor of Physical Chemistry, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. 2011 - 2014 Dean of Bachelor and Master studies Hubert Girault is the author of 2 textbooks, the co-author of about 600 scientific publications with more than 20'000 citations and the co-inventor of more than 15 patents. During his academic career, he has supervised 70 PhD students. 30 alumni of his laboratory are now Professors. Honours: Faraday medal 2006, Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry 2007, Reilley Award 2015. Fellow of the Electrochemical Society (USA), Shikata International medal, Polarography Society of Japan. Associate editor of Chemical Science
Victor Carle Adrien BoureauExpertise
Aberration-corrected TEM and STEMQuantative microscopyElectron diffractionStrain mapping (GPA, precession 4D-STEM)Electric and magnetic field mapping (electron holography, DPC, 4D-STEM)
Teaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Pierpaolo Ranieri Courses Scanning and Analytical Transmission Electron Microscopy MSE-735 This intensive course discusses advanced TEM techniques such as: scanning TEM; analytical TEM using EELS and EDX; aberration corrected imaging; and image s
Berend SmitBerend Smit received an MSc in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and an MSc in Physics both from the Technical University in Delft (the Netherlands). He received in 1990 cum laude PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He was a (senior) Research Physicists at Shell Research from 1988-1997, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 1997-2007.
In 2004 Berend Smit was elected Director of the European Center of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) Lyon France. Since 2007 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley and Faculty Chemist at Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2014 he has been director of the Energy Center at EPFL.
Mohammad Khaja NazeeruddinDr. Md. K. Nazeeruddin received M.Sc. and Ph. D. in inorganic chemistry from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. He joined as a Lecturer in Deccan College of Engineering and Technology, Osmania University in 1986, and subsequently, moved to Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute, Bhavnagar, as a Research Associate. He was awarded the Government of Indias fellowship in 1987 for study abroad. In 2014, EPFL awarded him the title of Professor. His current research at EPFL focuses on Dye Sensitized Solar Cells, Perovskite Solar Cells, CO2 reduction, Hydrogen production, and Light-emitting diodes. He has published more than 509 peer-reviewed papers, ten book chapters, and he is inventor/co-inventor of over 50 patents. The high impact of his work has been recognized by invitations to speak at over 130 international conferences, and has been nominated to the OLLA International Scientific Advisory Board. He appeared in the ISI listing of most cited chemists, and has more than 49'000 citations with an h-index of 105. He is teaching "Functional Materials" course at EPFL, and Korea University; directing, and managing several industrial, national, and European Union projects. He was awarded EPFL Excellence prize in 1998 and 2006, Brazilian FAPESP Fellowship in 1999, Japanese Government Science & Technology Agency Fellowship, in 1998, Government of India National Fellowship in 1987-1988. Recently he has been appointed as World Class University (WCU) professor by the Korea University, Jochiwon, Korea (http://dses.korea.ac.kr/eng/sub01_06_2.htm), Adjunct Professor by the King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Eminent Professor in Brunei. 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.
Didier TronoAfter obtaining an M.D. from the University of Geneva and completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Didier Trono embarked in a scientific career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to launch a center for AIDS research. He moved back to Europe seven years later, before taking the reins of the newly created EPFL School of Life Sciences, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. He is now actively engaged in the efforts of Switzerland to integrate new technologies in the fields of precision medicine and personalized health.
Emad OveisiDr Emad Oveisi is a senior scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Electron Microscopy (CIME), EPFL.
Emad received a BSc in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering (2005) and an MSc in Materials Science (2008) both from the University of Tehran (Iran). He graduated with a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at EPFL in 2014 for a thesis on the "Three-Dimensional STEM Imaging of Dislocations" under the direction of Prof. Cécile Hébert. The PhD thesis at the Electron Spectrometry and Microscopy Laboratory (LSME), served as an introduction to many of the advanced microscopy techniques that have proven to be a platform for his research career. A post-doctoral research at the centre for electron microscopy gave him the opportunity to peruse a cutting-edge research on one of the most modern aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopes.Since the inauguration of the Energypolis campus of EPFL in Sion, he has been the manager and reference scientist of the electron microscopy platform of EPFL-Valais, working with 9 research groups and more than 200 researchers. In addition to this core responsibility, he provides advanced microscopy consulting and service to EPFL scientists and assist their research to the highest level possible.
Emad Oveisi’s research focuses on the application and development of novel electron microscopy techniques, with emphasis on 3D imaging of crystal defects, as well as the precision measurement of materials properties using aberration-corrected S/TEM. In 2018, he received the prestigious Microscopy Innovation Award for inventing “Single-shot three-dimensional electron imaging”, a novel technique that enables 3D imaging of in situ dynamics.
In 2016 Emad was elected as an interim representative for the scientific staff ("corps intermédiaire") to the Council of the Institute of Chemistry (ISIC). Since 2019, he is a member of EPFL Teachers’ Council (CCE) and has been elected as one of its four bureau members. This role allows him to be exposed to new ideas and pedagogical challenges, as well being involved in discussions with the Vice Presidency of Education (VPE) and other teaching organisations for defining teaching strategies at the EPFL.
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