Johan AuwerxJohan 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.
Jacques FellayJacques Fellay is a medical scientist with expertise in infectious diseases and human genomics. He obtained his MD from the University of Lausanne in 2002 and his PhD from University of Utrecht. After a clinical training in infectious diseases in Switzerland and a 4-years postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, he joined the EPFL in April 2011 with an SNF Professorship.
On top of his EPFL affiliation, Jacques is also Head of Precision Medicine at the University Hospital (CHUV) in Lausanne, Group Leader at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, and Co-director of the Health2030 Genome Center at Campus Biotech in Geneva.
Denis DubouleDenis Duboule is born in 1955 and is both swiss and french national. He studied biology at the university of Geneva, where he obtained a PhD in mammalian embryology in 1984. He then spent 10 years abroad, first as a group leader in the medical faculty in Strasbourg (France), then at the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology (EMBL) in Germany. In 1993, he was appointed full professor at the university of Geneva, where he chairs the department of Genetics and Evolution ever since 1997. In 2001, he chaired the national center of research Frontiers in Genetics and in 2012 the division III of the SNSF. In 2006, he was appointed full professor at the federal institute of technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, where he leads the laboratory of Developmental Genomics (UpDUB).
His research activities are in the fields of embryology, genetics and developmental genomics of mammals, in an evolutionnary context. In particular, his laboratory has been closely associated with the structural and functional studies of mammalian Hox genes, by using mouse molecular genetic approaches. Duboule is also active in the communication of science, is member of the Academia Europea as well as of several academies in Switzerland, France and the Netherland. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society (UK) and of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He has received various scientific prizes and awards, amongst which the Marcel Benoist Prize, the Louis-Jeantet prize for medicine in 1998 or the international INSERM prize in 2010 (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Duboule). Florian Maria WurmFlorian Wurm received his academic training as a Biologist and Molecular Geneticist at the University of Giessen. He joined the Hoechst AG (Behringwerke) in Marburg as head of a laboratory in Virology. Working with immortalized mammalian cells for the establishment of production processes for alpha-interferons provided the first opportunity to combine basic research with medical application. In 1984 he joined Harvard Medical School in Boston as a Research Fellow in Molecular Biology. 1986 he took an offer from Genentech Inc. in San Francisco to work in Process Sciences on the development of large scale manufacturing processes for recombinant proteins. There he has held a number of leading positions and has acquired intimate knowledge in the generation of protein pharmaceuticals in mammalian cells in bioreactors (a number of which are now marketed products). In 1995 he joined the EPFL as a Professor for Biotechnology. Wurm has published more than 250 scientific papers and holds more than 20 patents/patent-applications. His H-index stands at 60 in 2021. He was Chairman (2005-2009) and is member of the Executive Board of the European Society of Animal Cell Technology (ESACT). He serves as a consultant to the pharmaceutical Biotech Industry, mainly in the fields of animal cell technology for recombinant protein production and in regulatory affairs. He works as a scientific reviewer and editior/asscciate editor for a number of international journals in the Biotech field. F.M. Wurm teaches classes to pre- and postgraduate students in the fields of Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology.
He was founder and Chief Scientific Officer of ExcellGene SA, a 2001 established company in Monthey, Switzerland. He took the position of President and CEO of ExcellGene in 2015. He retired from the CEO position in 2017 and continues to be President and Chief Scientific Officer of ExcellGene.
In 2008 Dr. Wurm was appointed Visiting Professor for Biotechnology at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He retired from his position at the EPFL in 2015. His laboratory is closed. With his team at ExcellGene and in collaboration with Dr. Paco Pino, Director of R&D, he continues to explore manufacturing sciences with animal cells in bioreactors.
Bernard MoretBernard M.E. Moret was born in Vevey, Switzerland, received baccalauréats in Latin-Greek and Latin-Mathematics, then did a Diploma in Electrical Engineering at EPFL. After working for 2 years for Omega and Swiss Timing on the development of real-time OS for sports applications, he left for the US. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the U. of Tennessee in 1980 and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM) that fall. He served as Chairman of the department from 1991 till 1993 and eventually retired in summer 2006 to join the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. (You can read about his work at UNM on his (archived) personal and laboratory web pages at UNM.) He was appointed group leader for phylogenetics at the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB). From 2009 until his retirement, he was also in charge of the BS and MS programs in Computer Science and Associate Dean for Education. He founded the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics (JEA) and served as its Editor-in-Chief for 7 years; he also helped found the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB), where he served as Associate Editor until 2008. He founded the annual Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI) and chairs its steering committee, and he serves on the steering committee of the Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX). Until summer 2008, he chaired the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH); now he is a charter member of the NIH College of Reviewers. He led a team of over 50 biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians in the CIPRES (Cyber Infrastructure for Phylogenetic Research) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for US$ 12 million over 5 years. He has published nearly 150 papers in computational biology, under funding from the US NSF, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the IBM Corporation, the US NIH, the Swiss NSF, and SystemsX.ch. He is a Fellow of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology). His Erdös number is 2 and (as of 2020) his h-index is 48.
