Stewart ColeProfessor Stewart Cole is an international authority in bacterial molecular-genetics and genomics. He has made outstanding contributions in several fields including: bacterial anaerobic electron transport; genome analysis of retroviruses and papillomaviruses; antibiotic resistance mechanisms; and the molecular microbiology of toxigenic clostridia. His studies on isoniazid and multidrug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, together with his pioneering work on the pathogenicity, evolution and genomics of the tubercle and leprosy bacilli, have made him an undisputed leader in the field of mycobacterial research. The findings of his research are of direct relevance to public health and disease-control in both the developing world and the industrialised nations. He has published over 250 scientific papers and review articles, and holds many patents.
César PulgarinProf. C. Pulgarin is Chemist from Lausanne University, Master in environmental chemistry from Geneva University, Ph D in synthesis bio-inspired of natural substances from Neuchâtel University. During his education he carried out several industrial trainings.
Since March 1989, he has been working at the EPFL where he is leader of the Advanced Oxidation Processes Group (GPAO) active in the development chemical, photochemical, electrochemical, ultrasonic processes, their coupling between them and with biological systems to degrade chemical and microbiological pollutants in water and air. He has an H index of 40 and he is the world most cited author in 1) TiO2 photo-assisted bacterial inactivation in water and 2) Coupling of photochemical and biological processes for pollutant degradation. He has been involved in ten African, South American and European international research projects. He has been Swiss representative in COST program 540.
Melanie BlokeschMelanie Blokesch holds a PhD degree from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. After a postdoctoral stay at Stanford University (USA; Department of Microbiology and Immunology) she joined EPFL as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in 2009 and was promoted to Associate Professor (tenured) in 2016. In 2018, Melanie Blokesch was nominated as new member of the the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) National Research Council (starting date: April 2019). Melanie Blokesch is also an elected member of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM; since 2018) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO; since 2019). Among other awards and grants, Melanie Blokesch has been honored with the Prize for Junior Scientists of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2005, an ERC Starting Grant in 2012, the EPFL teaching award "Polysphère" for best teacher in the School of Life Sciences (academic year 2014-2015), the Research Award by the Association for General and Applied Microbiology (VAAM; Germany) in 2015, and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016. In 2017, Melanie Blokesch was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Research Scholarship.
Françoise Gisou van der Goot GrunbergGisou van der Goot is the Head of the Laboratory of Cell and Membrane Biology, and founding member of the Global Health Institute (GHI), School of Life Sciences, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne/EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). She is currently Vice President for Responsible Transformation, in charge of reinforcing values such as inclusion and sustainability throughout the School’s campus. From 2014 to 2020, she was Dean of the School of Life Sciences. Before joining EPFL, she was Group Leader at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and subsequently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the same university. She studied engineering at the Ecole Centrale de Paris, then did a PhD in Molecular Biophysics at the Nuclear Energy Research Center, Saclay, France, followed by a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. She obtained an EMBO Young Investigator award in 2001, a Howard Hughes International Scholar award in 2005 and the Swiss Prix Marcel Benoist in 2009, the same year she was elected EMBO member (European Molecular Biology Organisation). She is a leader in the fields of molecular and cellular understanding of bacterial toxins, the organization of mammalian membranes and in organelles biology. Professor van der Goot is member of diverse scientific boards such as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), the Conseil suisse de la science et de la technologie (CSST) and the European Research Council (ERC).
