Concept
Data dredging
Related people (29)
Johan Auwerx
Johan Auwerx is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he occupies the Nestle Chair in Energy Metabolism. Dr. Auwerx has been using molecular physiology and systems genetics to understand metabolism in health, aging and disease. Much of his work focused on understanding how diet, exercise and hormones control metabolism through changing the expression of genes by altering the activity of transcription factors and their associated cofactors. His work was instrumental for the development of agonists of nuclear receptors - a particular class of transcription factors - into drugs, which now are used to treat high blood lipid levels, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Auwerx was amongst the first to recognize that transcriptional cofactors, which fine-tune the activity of transcription factors, act as energy sensors/effectors that influence metabolic homeostasis. His research validated these cofactors as novel targets to treat metabolic diseases, and spurred the clinical use of natural compounds, such as resveratrol, as modulators of these cofactor pathways.
Johan Auwerx was elected as a member of EMBO in 2003 and is the recipient of a dozen of international scientific prizes, including the Danone International Nutrition Award, the Oskar Minkowski Prize, and the Morgagni Gold Medal. His work is highly cited by his peers with a h-factor of over 100. He is an editorial board member of several journals, including Cell Metabolism, Molecular Systems Biology, The EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Biology, Cell, and Science. Dr. Auwerx co-founded a handful of biotech companies, including Carex, PhytoDia, and most recently Mitobridge, and has served on several scientific advisory boards.
Dr. Auwerx received both his MD and PhD in Molecular Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Aurelio Bay
Aurelio Bay graduated in physics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in 1980 and got his PhD degree from the same institution in 1986 for a work on the determination of the axial form factor of the ? meson.
He then went to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories (LBL), USA as a post doc for two years, where he worked on the TPC/2? Electromagnetic Calorimeter and the SSC/LHC detector. He then came back to Europe and was named Maître Assistant at University of Geneva till 1994, where he started working at the L3 experiment of LEP at CERN.
He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne in 1994 and Full Professor in 1998, continuing working at LEP, LEP2 and LHCb at CERN , and starting a collaboration at BELLE experiment at KEK, Tsukuba (Japan).
At the University of Lausanne he was Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Deputy Director of the Physics Department and Deputy of the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences.
In 2003, following the merge of UNIL physics department into the EPFL School of Basic Sciences, he was appointed Full Professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and Director of the EPFL Laboratory of High Energy Physics.
Olivier Schneider
After 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.
Christoph Frei