Patrick AebischerPatrick Aebischer a achevé une formation en Médecine (1980) et en Neurosciences (1983) aux Universités de Genève et de Fribourg en Suisse.
De 1984 à 1992, Patrick Aebischer a travaillé à Brown University (USA) au sein du Département des Neurosciences et au Département des Biomatériaux et des Organes Artificiels en tant que Professeur assistant, puis Professeur associé.
En 1992, Patrick Aebischer a été nommé Professeur de la Division Autonome de Recherche Chirurgicale et du Centre de Thérapie Génique (DARC) au Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) à Lausanne.
En 1999, Le Conseil Fédéral a nommé Patrick Aebischer en tant que Président de l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Il a pris ses fonctions à la Présidence de lEPFL en mars 2000, position qu'il a occupée jusqu'au 31 décembre 2016.
Patrick Aebischer est membre de maintes sociétés professionnelles, tant en Europe quaux Etats-Unis.
Patrick Aebischer a fondé trois start-up de biotechnologies. Il siège au conseil d'administration de Lonza, de Logitech et de Nestlé. Il préside également l'advisory board du Novartis Venture Fund. Patrick Aebischer est membre du conseil de fondation du Festival de Jazz de Montreux, du Festival de Verbier et de la Fondation Jacobs.
Les recherches quil poursuit actuellement dans son laboratoire se concentrent sur le développement d'approches de thérapie cellulaire et de transfert génique pour le traitement des maladies neurodégénératives.
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.
Didier TronoAfter obtaining an M.D. from the University of Geneva and completing a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Didier Trono embarked in a scientific career at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT. In 1990, he joined the faculty of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to launch a center for AIDS research. He moved back to Europe seven years later, before taking the reins of the newly created EPFL School of Life Sciences, which he directed from 2004 to 2012. He is now actively engaged in the efforts of Switzerland to integrate new technologies in the fields of precision medicine and personalized health.
Maria del Carmen Sandi PerezACADEMIC POSITION:
Professor, Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
EDUCATION:
BS MS Salamanca, Spain, 1984
PhD Cajal Institute, CSIC, and University Autonoma of Madrid, Spain, 1988
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Postdoc at INSERM, Bordeaux, France, and Cajal Institute Madrid, Spain, 1989-1990
Postdoc at the Open University, UK, 1991-1992, 1996
Research Associate, Cajal Institute, CSIC, Madrid, 1993-1995
Associate Professor Tenured, UNED University, Madrid, 1996-2003
Sabbatical Professor, University of Bern, Switzerland, 2002-2003
Assistant Professor Tenure-Track, EPFL, 2003-2007
Associate Professor Tenured, EPFL, 2007-2012
Full Professor, EPFL, 2012-
Director, Brain Mind Institute, EPFL, 2012-
PRINCIPAL BOARDS:
President, European Brain and Behavior Society (EBBS), 2009-2012
Editor-in-Chief Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
Member of Scientific Advisory Panel, European College Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP)
Member of the European Dana Alliance for the Brain (EDAB)
Associate Editor Frontiers in Neuroscience
Editorial Board Member Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Editorial Board Member Journal of Psychiatry Research
Editorial Board Member Stress
Editorial Board Member Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders
Editorial Board Member Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
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.
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). Yves BellouardDr. Yves Bellouard is Associate Professor in Microengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where he heads the Galatea lab and the Richemont Chair in micromanufacturing. He received a BS in Theoretical Physics and a MS in Applied Physics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France in 1994-1995 and a PhD in Microengineering from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2000. For his PhD work, he received the Omega Scientific prize (2001) for outstanding contribution in the field of microengineering for his work on Shape Memory Alloys. Before joining EPFL in 2015, he was Associate Professor at Eindhoven University of Technologies (TU/e) in the Netherlands and prior to that, Research Scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York for about four years where he started working on femtosecond laser processing of glass materials. From 2010 until 2013, Yves Bellouard initiated and coordinated the Femtoprint project, a European research initiative aiming at investigating a table-top printer for microsystems ('3D printing of microsystems'). In 2013, he received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant (Consolidator-2012) from the European Research Council and a JSPS Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His current research interests are on new paradigms for system integration at the microscale and in particular laser-based methods to tailor material properties for achieving higher level of integration in microsystems, like for instance integrating optics, mechanics and fluidics in a single monolith. These approaches open new opportunities for direct-write methods of microsystems (3D printing). Personal website
Hilal Lashuel2012-2013 Visiting Professor, Standford University. Stanford School of Medicine
2011- Associate Professor of Life Sciences-Brain Mind Institute-EPFL
Dir. Laboratory of Chemical Biology of Neurodegeneration
2005-2011 Assistant Professor of Life Sciences-Brain Mind Institute-EPFL
Dir. Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Neuroproteomics
2005-2008 Director- EPFL Proteomic Core Facility
2002-2004 Instructor of Neurology- Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's
Hospital
2001-2002 Sabbatical Fellow- Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration
Harvard Medical School,
2001-2002 Post-doctoral Fellow- Center for Neurologic Diseases
Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital
Advisor- Prof. Peter T. Lansbury
2000-2001 Research Scientist, The Picower Institute for Medical Research, Great Neck
New York
1994-2000 PhD Student; Texas A&M University and the Scripps Research Institute
Advisor- Prof. Jeffery W. Kelly
1990-1994 B.S. City University of New York, Brooklyn College
Dr. Hilal A. Lashuel received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from the City University of New York in 1994 and completed his doctoral studies at Texas A&M University and the Scripps Research Institute in 2000. After obtaining his doctoral degree, he became a research fellow at the Picower Institute for Medical Research in Long Island New York. In 2001, he moved to Harvard Medical School and the Brigham and Women's Hospital as a research fellow in the Center for Neurologic Diseases and was later promoted to an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School. During his tenure (2001-2004) at Harvard Medical School his work focused on understanding the mechanisms of protein misfolding and fibrillogenesis and the role of these processes in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. In 2005 Dr. Lashuel moved Switzerland to join the Brain Mind Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne as a tenure-track assistant professor in neurosciences. Currently, Dr. Lashuel is an associate professor of life sciences and the director of the laboratory of molecular and chemical biology of neurodegeneration. (http://lashuel-lab.epfl.ch/).
Research efforts in the Lashuels laboratory focus on understanding the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration and developing novel strategies to diagnose and treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease. Research in the Lashuel lab is funded by several international funding agencies and foundations, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, European FP7 program (Marie Curie and ERC grants), Human Science Frontiers, Strauss Foundation, Cure the Huntingtons disease foundation and Michael J Fox foundation and is supported by collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies (http://lashuel-lab.epfl.ch/page-50538-en.html), Nestle, Merck-Serono, AC Immune and Johnson and Johnson.
Dr. Lashuels research has resulted in the characterization of novel quaternary structure intermediates on the amyloid pathway, identification of potential therapeutic targets, and new hypotheses concerning the mechanisms of pathogenesis in Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease and related disorders. Dr. Lashuel scientific contribution to this field includes i) more than100 publications in major peer reviewed journals including Nature journals, Cell, PNAS, JBC, J. Neuroscience JACS, and Angewandtie Chemie; ii) three patents on novel strategies for preventing protein aggregation and treating autoimmune and inflammatory diseases; iii) more than 150 invited lectures since 2002 and more than 5500 citations (7800 citation-Google Scholar) since 1996. Dr. Lashuel has received several pre-doctoral and post-doctoral awards and fellowships and was the recipient of two prestigious awards given to young investigators; Human Science Frontiers young investigator research award and the European Research Council (ERC) starting independent researcher grant and the ERC proof of concept award (2013) These awards provide more than $2.5 Million to Dr. Lashuel to translate some of his ideas and projects into novel strategies for diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons disease. Dr. Lashuel has chaired and co-organized several international conferences and serves as an academic editor for PLoS ONE, an associate editor for frontiers of molecular neuroscience, member of the Editorial advisory board of ChemBioChem and ad hoc reviewer for several international scientific journals and funding agencies. Véronique MichaudBackground:
1994 Habilitation à diriger des recherches ( INPG, France)
1991 PhD in Materials Engineering ( MIT, USA)
1987 Ingénieur Civil des Mines ( Ecole des Mines de Paris, France)
Activities:
Since January 2018: Associate Dean of Engineering, in charge of Education
June 2012-Dec.2017: Head of the Materials Science and Engineering Section
Since April 2017: Associate Professor at EPFL
2009-2017 : Professeur Titulaire at EPFL
1997-2009: Researcher at EPFL
1994-1997 : Chef de Travaux au laboratoire MSS-MAT, Ecole Centrale Paris (France)
1991-1994 : Post-doctoral research associate, MIT (USA)
Author of about 300 publications of which 140 in peer-reviewed journals
