Melanie 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.
Francesco Stellacci graduated in Materials Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano in 1998 with a thesis on photochromic polymers with Prof. Giuseppe Zerbi and Mariacarla Gallazzi. In 1999 he moved to the Chemistry Department of the University of Arizona for as a post-doc in the group of Joe Perry in close collaboration with the group of Seth Marder. In 2002 he moved to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor. He was then promoted to associate without (2006) and with tenure (2009). In 2010 he moved to the Institute of Materials at EPFL as a full Professor. He holds the Alcan EP Chair. Francesco was one of the recipients of the Technology Review TR35 "35 Innovator under 35" award in 2005, and the Popular Science Magazine "Brilliant 10" award in 2007. He has been a Packard Fellow starting 2005.
Bernard 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.
2014 - present Associate Professor, EPFL and adjunct researcher, Eawag 2007 - 2013 Assistant Professor, EPFL 2004 - 2006 Postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley 2000 - 2004 PhD, Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University 1999 Diploma, Environmental Sciences, ETHZ
