Bart Deplancke

Bart Deplancke graduated as a Biochemical Engineer at Ghent University (Belgium, 1998) after which he pursued doctoral studies in Immunobiology at the University of Illinois (USA) and postdoctoral work in regulatory genomics at the Harvard and UMass Medical Schools (USA). In 2007, he established his lab at the EPFL School of Life Sciences where he is now a Full Professor and former Vice-Dean of Innovation. There, he is developing new, often single cell-related technologies to study how the genome mediates cellular and organismal phenotypic diversity, especially in a metabolic context, resulting in >150 peer-reviewed publications to date in well-recognized peer-reviewed journals. These efforts led for example to the discovery of a new anti-adipogenic stromal cell type (Schwalie et al., Nature, 2018); a new genomic concept, chromatin modules, that rationalize gene regulation in 3D (Waszak et al., Cell, 2015); as well as the development of a live cell transcriptomic profiling approach (Live-seq; Chen et al, Nature, 2022). In 2013, he became a Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Group Leader; in 2017, he was elected to the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); in 2021, he received the Cloëtta Prize for outstanding contributions to biomedical research; in 2022, the Leenaards Prize for Biomedical Translational Research as well as an SNSF Advanced Grant (ERC equivalent); in 2023, he was awarded EMBO membership; and in 2026 the International Francqui Professor Chair prize. He is also the co-founder of two Biotech companies (Genohm, Acquired by Agilent in 2018; and Alithea Genomics). Teaching & PhD PhD Students Wenyu Liu, Théo Nass, Augoustina Maria Economou, Horia Hashimi, Timothée Ferrari, Loïc David, Laurine Cécile Florentine Van Gijn, Angelika Gebhart, Camille Lucie Germaine Lambert, Marie Denise Rumpler, Antoni Jakub Gralak, Elisa Bugani, Geoffray Marie-Devillard Past EPFL PhD Students Jovan Simicevic, Carine Delattre-Gubelmann, Andreas Massouras, Irina Krier, Alina Isakova, Sebastian Martin Waszak, Rachana Narendra Pradhan, Adamandia Kapopoulou, Roel Bevers, Michael Vincent Frochaux, Teresa Didonna, Riccardo Dainese, Romain Groux, Magda Zachara, Maria Litovchenko, Johannes Julius Bues, Marjan Biocanin, Gerard Llimos Aubach, Ann-Kristin Hov, Pernille Yde Rainer, Radiana Ferrero, Rita Sarkis, Maksim Kholmatov, Olga Pushkarev, Jose Antonio Vasquez Porto Viso, Wangjie Liu Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Julia Catharina Cajan, Maroun Bou Sleiman, Petar Scepanovic, Caterina Collodet, Sara Ancel Courses Genetics and genomics BIO-373 The theoretical part of this course covers classical genetics and contemporary genomics. Because bioinformatics has become important for genomic research, the course also includes practical applications to genomic analyses using Python, including group projects. Single cell biology BIOENG-420 The students are exposed to experimental and analytical approaches specific to single cell biology, with an emphasis on quantitative aspects. Awards Leenaards Science Prize 2022 Cloëtta Prize 2021 Membership to European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) 2023