Hannes Markus PeterCurrent work
I am a microbial ecologist and mainly interested in factors shaping bacterial communities and functioning in freshwater ecosystems. I use combinations of field observations, experiments and molecular techniques to test hypotheses regarding the assembly of microbial communities, the influence of environmental variability and relationships between diversity and funcioning. I enjoy working in alpine environments, which are sensitive to climate change and represent excellent model systems.
Teaching
Esther AmstadEsther Amstad studied material science at ETH in Zurich. She also carried out her PhD thesis at the same University under the supervision of Prof. Marcus Textor; for her thesis, she worked on the surface modification and steric stabilization of oxide nanoparticles. As a postdoctoral fellow, she joined the experimental condensed soft matter group of David A. Weitz at Harvard University where she used droplet based microfluidics to assemble different types of functional micro- and nanomaterials. In addition, she developped new microfluidic devices that enable the production of very small, airborne drops as well as devices that produce highly monodisperse emulsion drops at a very high throughput. In June 2014, Esther joined the material science department (IMX) of EPFL where she is leading the Soft Materials Laboratory (SMAL).
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.
Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa CorreiaThroughout my PhD and postdoctoral studies I was trained in world-renowned laboratories and institutions in the United States of America (University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute). Very early in my scientific career I found out my fascination about protein structure and function. My PhD studies evolved in the direction of immunogen design and vaccine engineering which sparked my interest in the many needs and opportunities in vaccinology and translational research. My efforts resulted in an enlightening piece of work where for the first time, computationally designed immunogens elicited potent neutralizing antibodies. During my postdoctoral studies I joined a chemical biology laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute. In this stage I developed novel chemoproteomics methods for the identification of protein-small molecule interaction sites in complex proteomes. In March 2015, I joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland as a tenure track assistant professor. The focus of my research group is to develop computational tools for protein design with particular emphasis in applying these strategies to immunoengineering (e.g. vaccine and cancer immunotherapy). The activities in my laboratory focus on computational design methods development and experimental characterization of the designed proteins. Our laboratory has been awarded with 2 prestigious research grants from the European Research Council. Lastly, I have been awarded the prize for best teacher of Life sciences in 2019.
Andrea AblasserTeaching & PhD PhD Students Ekaterina Gorbacheva, Iris Arianna Dorschel, Tieliang Gan, Yu Meng Past EPFL PhD Students Simone Margret Haag, Sélène Glück, Marilena Wischnewski, Sophie Rivara, Natasha Samson Courses Immunology - advances and therapeutic implications BIO-479 The students acquire advanced level knowledge regarding the functioning of the (vertebrate) immune system. A strong focus is placed on the molecular mechanisms underlying innate and adaptive immune responses and their impl
Elisa OricchioExpertise
Cancer geneticsMouse modelsTherapyStem cellsLymphoma
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Vamsi Krishna Polavarapu, Asli Ece Kasapoglu, Konstantina Georgakopoulou, Eleni Balli Past EPFL PhD Students Maria Christine Donaldson, Elena Battistello, Daniel Pereira Duarte, Frédérica Schyrr, Ruxandra-Andreea Lambuta, Aaron Simone Petruzzella, Jixing Zhong, Justine Epiney Courses Cancer biology I BIO-471 The course covers in detail molecular mechanisms of cancer development with emphasis on cell
Wendy Lee QueenTeaching & PhD PhD Students Pratap Narayan Soni, Pattaraphon Rodlamul, Matthieu Meoli, Olivier Thomas Smith, Sanjay Venkatachalam, Anne Faustine Sido Belin, Christopher William Gardner, Lorenzo Meneghin Past EPFL PhD Students Mehrdad Asgari, Daniel Teav Sun, Ilia Kochetygov, Vikram Vinayak Karve, Anita Justin, Till Marian Schertenleib, Jocelyn Richard Roth, Timo Markus Oskar Felder Courses Chemical engineering practice ChE-309 This course provides the students with practical experience wit
Andreas ZüttelTeaching & PhD PhD Students Boyu Ouyang, Wai Kwan Liu, Guillaume Bérenger Rod, Aleksandar Mihaylov Mikov, Rui Li, Akhil Varma Penmathsa Past EPFL PhD Students Robin Tobias Andreas Mutschler, Kun Zhao, Loris Giovanni Lombardo, Mo Li, Jie Zhang, Youngdon Ko, Cedric David Koolen, Thi Ha My Pham, Zohreh Akbari, Yasemen Kuddusi Courses Thermodynamics of energy conversion and storage ChE-414 The course is an introduction to the energy conversion. It focusseson the thermodynamics of the engines a
Dimitrios TerzisDimitrios Terzis received his Civil Engineering diploma from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 2014, having spent a year in the ESTP, Paris as an exchange student. In 2017, he graduated with a doctoral degree (PhD) in Mechanics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). His research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 200021_140246) and a scholarship of Academic Excellence of the Swiss Federal Government (No. 2014.0276), focused on the crystallisation of calcium carbonate in soils. With his thesis, Dimitrios contributed in the fields of advanced material characterisation through microscopy and X-Ray tomography techniques, predictive modelling and full-scale geotechnical applications. He’s the co-inventor of three EPFL patents and the author of more than 10 peer-reviewed publications with an h-index of 6 (Scopus, as of 08/2020). He is the recipient of grants and awards which sum up to over CHF 1 Mn, among which an EPFL Innogrant Fellowship (2018), a Swiss National Science foundation BRIDGE grant (2019) and an Innobooster grant from the Gebert rüf Stiftung. Since 2019 he is the principal lecturer and responsible for the course Innovation for construction and the environment which is part of EPFL's Master's program in Civil Engineering.
Bence DienesBence Dienes joined EPFL as a doctoral assistant of the soil biogeochemistry laboratory (SOIL) in February 2023. He aims to understand the fundamental principles and processes that govern the biogeochemical cycling of key elements in alpine soils. Bence holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in environmental sciences and biogesciences from the University of Lausanne. Passionate in mountains, he expanded his understanding in alpine habitats during his Master thesis and he was part of the GLORIA research te
Tom Ian BattinTeaching & PhD PhD Students Zhe Liu, Aleksei Dukat, Martin Boutroux, Jingyi Hou, Léa Francomme, Stefan Eckensperger Past EPFL PhD Students Amin Niayifar, David Scheidweiler, Asa Lovisa Viktoria Horgby, Marta Boix Canadell, Pier Luigi Segatto, Anna Depetris, Jade Brandani, Massimo Bourquin, Jonas Paccolat, David Touchette Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Jeremy Wong Courses Aquatic ecosystems ENV-321 Inland waters are now being recognized are major players of global biogeochemical cycle
David Lyndon EmsleyCurrent Work
Our research centres on the development of new NMR spectroscopy experiments to determine the atomic-level structure and dynamics of complex materials and molecular systems, to solve a range of problems across disciplines.
Teaching & PhD PhD Students Ray Cowen, Ümmügülsüm Günes, Máté Visegrádi, Ruben Rodriguez Madrid Past EPFL PhD Students Dominik Józef Kubicki, Arthur César Pinon, Albert Hofstetter, Federico Maria Paruzzo, Baptiste Busi, Snaedis Björgvinsdóttir, Martins Balodis, Aditya Mishra
Oliver KröcherExpertise
Catalysis, Sustainable Energy Carriers from CO₂ and Biomass, Emission Control, Environmental Chemistry, Materials Chemistry
Mission
The Group for Sustainable Energy Carriers (GSE) at EPFL works on the development of catalytic processes for the production and use of carbon-neutral energy carriers and intermediates.
Current Work
Small-scale ammonia synthesis, using induction-heating and sorption-enhancement.
Oliver Kröcher was born in Germany and received his Diploma in chemistry from the University
Paraskevi PramateftakiThroughout the years I focused on the molecular typing of microorganisms of various sources aiming to the accurate identification, classification and comparison of microorganisms and their subtypes. My experience extents on both eukaryotic (filamentous fungi/yeasts) and prokaryotic (Gram bacteria) microbes, on the development and application of culture dependent molecular approaches for the study of microbial populations and the use of bioinformatics tools for data mining. In my current position I am involved in the application of culture independent molecular methods for studying stream microbial biofilms.