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.
Athanasios NenesTeaching & PhD PhD Students Berkay Dönmez, Ernest Abboud Past EPFL PhD Students Paraskevi Georgakaki, Lucile Ricard Courses Atmospheric processes: from cloud to global scales ENV-407 The main objective is to present important atmospheric processes from the local to global scales. The course will start with cloud processes, continue to synoptic phenomena like extratropical cyclones and fronts, to finally cover numerical modeling at the regional and global scales. Introduction to environme
Nikolaos StergiopoulosEducation
MTE, Managing the Technology Enterprise Program (2000), IMD, Lausanne
Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering & Engineering Mechanics (1990) Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.
MS in Biomedical Engineering (1987) Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.
Diploma in Mechanical Engineering (1985) National Technical University of Athens.
Professional Activities
2002 - present: Professor and director of LHTC
2010 - present: Founder and director of Rheon Medical SA, Préverenges, Switzerland
2008 - present: Founder and director of Antlia S.A., PSE-C, EPFL campus, Switzerland
1998 - 2007: Founder and Scientific Director of EndoArt S.A., Lausanne, Switzerland
1996 - 2002: Assistant professor at the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.
1991 - 1996: Research Associate at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne
1990 - 1991: Lecturer, Iowa State University
Bruno HerbelinSince 10/09 - Scientist Laboratory of cognitive neuroscience Brain & Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 06/12 - 10/19 Deputy Director Center for Neuroprosthetics École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. 11/05 - 09/09 Assistant Professor Aalborg University Esbjerg Institute of Technology & Copenhagen Institute of Technology, Denmark. 07/01 - 09/05 Research assistant PhD student Virtual Reality Laboratory School of Computer and Communications, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Thomas MountfordTeaching & PhD Past EPFL PhD Students Damien Gauthier, Samir Brahim Belhaouari, Driss Baraka, Daniel Rodrigues Valesin, Samuel Schöpfer, Kamran Kalbasi, Jacques Saliba, Hao Xue, Keming Chen Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Guillaume Charles Woessner Courses Analysis I MATH-101(d) Study the fundamental concepts of analysis, and the differential and integral calculus of real-valued functions of one real variable. Markov chains MATH-332 The course follows the text of Norris
Marcel SalathéTeaching & PhD PhD Students Laura Espinosa Montalbán, Marouane Toumi, Rohan Singh Past EPFL PhD Students Gianrocco Lazzari, Martin Mathias Müller, Sharada Prasanna Mohanty Courses Digital epidemiology BIO-512 Epidemiology is foundational to medicine and public health. This course starts with the key principles of classical epidemiology, progressing through computational modeling techniques, and concluding with the digital approaches of today. Students will also develop a digital epidemiolo
Lenka ZdeborováLenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director's Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka's expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.
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
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.
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 JaggiMartin Jaggi is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL, heading the Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory. Before that, he was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, at the Simons Institute in Berkeley, and at École Polytechnique in Paris. He has earned his PhD in Machine Learning and Optimization from ETH Zurich in 2011, and a MSc in Mathematics also from ETH Zurich.
Priscilla TurelliPositions
2005-now: Research associate, Federal School of Life Sciences, Laboratory of Virology and Genetics, Lausanne, Switzerland
2001-2004: Research associate in Pr D. Tronos laboratory, Department of Microbiology, Geneva School of Medicine, Switzerland
1997-2001: Post-doctoral research fellow in Pr D. Tronos laboratory, Department of Microbiology, Geneva School of Medicine, Switzerland
Honors and fellowships
2004: Bristol-Myers Squibb AIDS AWARD
1997-1999: Human Frontier Science Program fellowship
Education
June 1997:
PhD in cellular biology.
Final mark:jury congratulations.
Université de la Méditerranée, France.
June 1993:
Post-graduate diploma in cellular biology and microbiology.
INSERM U372, Marseille-Luminy, université de Provence, France.
June 1992:
Master in cellular biology Specialty: genetic.
Final mark: Best master student of this year.
Université de la Méditerranée, France.
June 1987:
Scientific baccalaureate, France.
Teaching experience
2009-now: phD thesis co-director, School of Life Sciences, Lausanne, Switzerland.
2002: Tutor in virology for medical students, 2nd year, Geneva School of Medicine, Switzerland.
1996-1997: Tutor in molecular biology and biochemistry for under-graduate students,
Université de la Méditerranée, Aix Marseille II, France.
