Catherine DehollainShe got the Master Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982 from EPFL. Then, she worked in Geneva up to 1990 as a Senior Design Engineer in telecommunications at the European research center of Motorola. From 1990 up to 1995, she did her PhD thesis at the Chaire des Circuits et Systemes at EPFL in the domain of impedance broadband matching circuits. Since 1995, she is responsible at EPFL for the RFIC group. She has participated to different Swiss research projects as well as European projects dedicated to data communication of sensors nodes (e.g. MuMoR, Minami European projects) as well as remote powering of sensor nodes. Her main domains of interest are telecom applications (e.g. Impulse radio Ultra-Wide Band, super-regenerative receivers, RFIDs)as well as biomedical applications. She has been the coordinator of European projects (e.g. FP6 SUPREGE, FP7 Ultrasponder)and of Swiss projects (e.g. CAPED CTI project, NEURO-IC SNF project).
Aurelio MuttoniAurelio Muttoni is full Professor and Head of the Structural Concrete Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland). He received his diploma and PhD in civil engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, in 1982 and 1989, respectively.
His current teaching activities focus on the conceptual design of structures, theory and dimensioning of concrete structures as well as bridge design. His research group is active in the following domains: behaviour and design methods for structural concrete, conceptual design of innovative structures, shear in structural concrete, punching shear of slabs, nonlinear structural analysis including its reliability, bond between steel and concrete, aggregate interlocking, fatigue and influence of sustained loading on the concrete strength, mechanical behaviour and design concepts for ultra-high performance concrete, textile concrete and recycled concrete.
Aurelio Muttoni was the recipient of the Chester Paul Siess Award for Excellence in Structural Research in 2010 and the co-recipient of the Wason Medal for Most Meritorious Paper in 2014 of the American Concrete Institute. He is a member of the Presidium of fib (International Federation for Structural Concrete), several fib commissions and task groups and has been Project Team Leader for the second generation of EN 1992-1-1 (Eurocode for structural concrete).
Aurelio Muttoni is also cofounder and partner of the Muttoni & Fernández consulting office (www.mfic.ch). This office is active in the conceptual design, analysis and dimensioning of load-bearing structure in architecture and civil engineering constructions as well as consulting activities in the field of structural engineering. Nikolaos GeroliminisProf. Nikolas Geroliminis is an Associate Professor at EPFL and the head of the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS). Before joining EPFL he was an Assistant Professor on the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He has a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a MSc and Ph.D. in civil engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He is an Associate Editor for Transportation Research part C and he also serves in the editorial board of TR, part B, Transportation Letters, Journal of ITS and of many international conferences. He is a member of the Transportation Research Board's Traffic Flow Theory Committee. His research interests focus primarily on urban transportation systems, traffic flow theory and control, public transportation and logistics, Optimization and Large Scale Networks. He is a recent recipient of the ERC Starting Grant METAFERW: Modeling and controlling traffic congestion and propagation in large-scale urban multimodal networks
Education
Diploma, 2003, Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
M.S., 2004, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Ph.D., 2007, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley
Jan Sickmann HesthavenProf. Hesthaven received an M.Sc. in computational physics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in August 1991. During the studies, the last 6 months of 1989 was spend at JET, the european fusion laboratory in Culham, UK. Following graduation, he was awarded a 3 year fellowship to begin work towards a Ph.D. at Riso National Laboratory in the Department of Optics and Fluid Dynamics. During the 3 years of study, the academic year of 1993-1994 was spend in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and three 3 months during the summer of 1994 in Department of Mathematics and Statistics at University of New Mexico. In August 1995, he recieved a Ph.D. in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematical Modelling (DTU). Following graduation in August 1995, he was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Advanced Scientific Computing and was approinted Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. In December of 1996, he was appointed consultant to the Institute of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering(ICASE) at NASA Langley Research Center (NASA LaRC). As of July 1999, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics, in September 2000 he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, as of July 2001 he was awarded a Manning Assistant Professorship, and in March 2002, he was awarded an NSF Career Award. In January 2003, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics with tenure and in May 2004 he was awarded Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences (the highest award given for teaching excellence in all sciences at Brown University). He was promoted to Professor of Applied Mathematics as of July 2005. From October 2006 to June 2013, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV) at Brown University. As of October 2007, he holds the (honorary) title of Professor (Adjunct) at the Technical University of Denmark. In November 2009, he successfully defended his dr.techn thesis at the Technical University of Denmark and was rewarded the degree of Doctor Technices -- the highest academic distinction awarded based on ... substantial and lasting contributions that has helped to move the research area forward and penetrated into applications. As grant Co-PI he served from Aug 2010 to June 2013 as Deputy Director of the Institute of Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), the newest NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. After having spend his entire academic career at Brown University, Prof Hesthaven decided to pursue new challenges and joined the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in July 2013. In March 2014 he was elected SIAM Fellow for contributions to high-order methods for partial differential equations.
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.
René SalathéRené Paul Salathé is Professor em. at EPFL since 2009. He is currently a technology consultant for several companies and he serves as an expert member of the Life Science team at the Swiss Innovation Agency (KTI/CTI) in Bern, on the scientific advisory board of the Fraunhofer-Institut für Lasertechnik ILT in Aachen, and he participates on expert panels for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a member of the Swiss Society for Optics and Microscopy, the European Optical Society, the Optical Society of America, a senior member of the IEEE, and a life time member of the Swiss Physical Society.
René Paul Salathé received the MS, PhD, and Habilitation (Privatdozent) degrees at the University of Bern in 1970, 1974, and 1979, respectively. Prior to his appointment at EPFL in 1989, he was directing the division "Material Testing and Technology" at the research and development center of the Swiss PTT. He has been active in the fields of semiconductor lasers, fibers, integrated optics, laser processing, and biomedical optics. The results of his research activities have been published more than 250 scientific contributions and 37 PhD theses at EPFL. Several start-up companies have been founded based on patents elaborated in his laboratory and/or by his PhD students. His actual research interests are in the areas of laser tweezers in micro-fluidics for biochemical applications and in optical fiber sensor applications.
