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.
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
Pierre MagistrettiPierre J. Magistretti is an internationally-recognized neuroscientist who has made significant contributions in the field of brain energy metabolism. His group has discovered some of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie the coupling between neuronal activity and energy consumption by the brain.
This work has considerable ramifications for the understanding of the origin of the signals detected with the current functional brain imaging techniques used in neurological and psychiatric research (see for example Magistretti et al, Science, 283: 496 497, 1999). He is the author of over 100 articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
He has given over 80 invited lectures at international meetings or at universities in Europe and North America, including the 2000 Talairach Lecture at the Functional Mapping of the Human Brain Conference. In November 2000 he has been a Mc Donnel Visiting Scholar at Washington University School of Medicine.
Pierre J. Magistretti is the President-Elect (2002 2004) of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) which has a membership of over 15000 European neuroscientists. He has been first president of the Swiss Society for Neuroscience (1997-1999) and the first Chairman of the Department of Neurosciences of the University of Lausanne (1996 1998).
Pierre J. Magistretti is Professor of Physiology (since 1988) at the University of Lausanne Medical School. He has been Vice-Dean of the University of Lausanne Medical School from 1996 to 2000. Pierre Magistretti, is Director of the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL and Director of the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience of the University of Lausanne and CHUV. He is also Director of the NCCR SYNAPSY "the synaptic bases of mental diseases".
POSITIONS AND HONORS
MAIN POSITION HELD
1988-2004 Professor of Physiology, University of Lausanne Medical School
1996-2000 Vice-Dean for Preclinical Departments, University of Lausanne Medical School
2001-2004 Chairman, Department of Physiology, University of Lausanne Medical School
2004-present Professor and Director, Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry, University of Lausanne Medical School and Hospitals (UNIL-CHUV) (Joint appointment with EPFL)
2005-2008 Professor and Co-Director, Brain Mind Institute, Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne (Joint appointment with UNIL-CHUV)
2007-present Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of Centre dImagerie Biomédicale (CIBM), an Imaging Consortium of the Universities, University Hospitals of Lausanne and Geneva and of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2008-present Professor and Director, Brain Mind Institute, Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne Joint appointment with UNIL-CHUV)
2010-present Director, National Center for Competence in Research (NCCR)
The synaptic bases of mental diseases of the Swiss National Science Foundation
2010-present Secretary General, International Brain Research Organization (IBRO)
MAIN HONORS AND AWARDS
1997 Recipient of the Theodore-Ott Prize of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences
2001 Elected Member of Academia Europaea
2001 Elected Member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, ad personam
2002 Recipient of the Emil Kraepelin Guest Professorship, Max Planck Institute für Psychiatry, Münich
2006 Elected Professor at Collège de France, Paris, International Chair 2007-2008
2009 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship, Canadian Psychological Association
2011 Camillo Golgi Medal Award, Golgi Fondation
2011 Elected Member of the American College of NeuroPsychopharmacology (ACNP)
Giorgio MargaritondoCitizen of the USA and Switzerland, Giorgio Margaritondo was born in Rome, Italy, in 1946. He received the Laurea summa cum laude from the University of Rome in 1969. From 1969 he was an employee of the Italian National Research Council in Rome and Frascati and, in 1975-77, he was at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1978 to 1990, he was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA; in 1984 he was nominated associate director for research of the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the same university. In 1990 he was nominated "professeur ordinaire" (full professor) at the EPFL; he directed the Institute of Applied Physics and the Physics Department. He was also a honorary faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2001 he became Dean of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. In 2004 he was nominated Provost and he served until 2010, when he became Dean of Continuing Education, until his retirement from the EPFL in 2016 In addition to teaching general physics, his activity concerns the physics of semiconductors and superconductors (electronic states, surfaces and interfaces) and of biological systems; his main experimental techniques are electron spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, x-ray imaging and scanning near-field microscopy, including experiments with synchrotron light and with free electron lasers. Author of more than 700 scientific publications and 9 books, he was also coordinator in 1995-98 of the scientific division of the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste. In 1997-2003 he was coordinator of the European Commission Round Table on synchrotron radiation, and then became president of the Council of the European Commission Integrated Initiative on Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Science (IA-SFS and then ELISA), the largest network in the world in this domain. In 2011-15, he was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). He is currently vice-president of the council of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), and president of the Scientific and Technological Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Vacuum Society and Fellow and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics.
Marco GrioniMarco Grioni was born in Milan (Italy) where he graduated in 1982. He has occupied research positions at Minneapolis (USA), Nijmegen (The Netherlands), Orsay (France) and Neuchâtel, where he became Privat Docent in Solid State Physics in 1994. Since 1996 he is at EPFL, where he teaches physics to undergraduate and graduate students. He is acting director of the Laboratory of Electron Spectroscopy of IPN, and an adjunct professor from 2005.
His research interests concern the electronic properties of novel materials,namely high-temperature superconductors, low-dimensional metals, and heavy fermion compounds, which he investigates by high-resolution photoemission (ARPES), ultrafast time-resolved ARPES, and photon-in photon-out synchrotron-based spectroscopies. Author of approx. 220 scientific articles, he is actively involved in the development of new instruments. From 2003 to 2006 he was the chairman of the users organization of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF Grenoble). Between 2010 and 2017 he served as chairman of the scientific advisory committee of the french national synchrotron light source SOLEIL
Benoît Marie Joseph DeveaudBenoit Deveaud is now Research Director at Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau (France)
Benoît Deveaud was born in France in 1952. In 1971, he enters Ecole Polytechnique in Paris where he specializes in physics. In 1974, he joins the National Center for research in Telecommunications (CNET).
He undertakes at the same time studies on the main impurity centers in III-V semiconductors, and continues his studies in physics by preparing a diploma in solid state physics in Rennes. In 1984, he defends his PhD thesis at the University of Grenoble, under the supervision of Gérard Martinez. Meanwhile, his team gets interested in semiconductor microstructures and launches studies on the structural and optical properties of superlattices based on gallium arsenide. These studies highlight for example vertical transport in superlattices as well as the quantification of excitonic energies in a quantum well.
In 1986 he joins the team of Daniel Chemla in Bell Laboratories (Holmdel, USA) and takes part in the development of the first luminescence set-up having a temporal resolution better than 1 picosecond. He studies then ultrafast processes in quantum wells.
Returning to France in 1988, at CNET, he coaches a laboratory of high-speed studies, interested in the optical and electronic properties of semiconductor materials.
Appointed professor in Physics at EPFL in October 1993, his research team studies the physics of ultrafast processes in semiconductor micro and nanostructures and in devices that use them. He has been the Director the Institute of Micro and Optoelectronics since 1998, then of the Institute of Quantum Photonic and Electronics from 2003 to 2008.
His team takes an active part in the "Quantum Photonics" National Center of Competence in Research, of which he was the Deputy Director from 2001 to 2005 then the Director from July 2005 till the end of the NCCR in 2013
From 2008 till 2014 he has been Dean for Research at EPFL and president of the research commission.
Starting in 2014, he has been head of Physics, till his departure from EPFL in 2017.
He has been a divisional editor of Physical Review Letters from 2001 to 2007.
Gervais ChapuisClick here for a more complete biography
Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. After graduating in crystallography in 1966, he prepared his PhD thesis in the same institution under the direction of Prof.. A. Niggli which he obtained in 1972. For three years he continued his research at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California in the laboratory of Prof. D. H. Templeton, a well-known specialist in the field of resonant scattering. Back in Switzerland, he joined the newly created Institute of Crystallography at the University of Lausanne under the direction of Prof.. D. Schwarzenbach. In 1991 he was appointed full professor and in 1999, director of the Institute of crystallography. In 2003, his unit was transferred to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL) where he was appointed professor.
G. Chapuis has chaired numerous committees in national and international organisations in the field of crystallography. In particular, he chaired the committee of aperiodic structures of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). He is also a member of the Education Committee of that organization. He also chaired the Swiss Society of Crystallography.
G. Chapuis is co-editor of the Journal Acta Crystallographica and participates in many committees for various readings of academic journals devoted to crystallography and solid state physics.
His research areas cover more specifically the theoretical and experimental study of aperiodic structures, especially incommensurate structures by diffraction and molecular dynamics. He is the author of over two hundred scientific papers published in international peer-reviewed journals. Moreover G. Chapuis is dedicated to the development of interactive teaching in crystallography using new communication technologies available on the Internet.
