Concept
Pathogen transmission
Related people (33)
Françoise Gisou van der Goot Grunberg
Gisou van der Goot is the Head of the Laboratory of Cell and Membrane Biology, and founding member of the Global Health Institute (GHI), School of Life Sciences, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne/EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). She is currently Vice President for Responsible Transformation, in charge of reinforcing values such as inclusion and sustainability throughout the School’s campus. From 2014 to 2020, she was Dean of the School of Life Sciences. Before joining EPFL, she was Group Leader at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and subsequently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the same university. She studied engineering at the Ecole Centrale de Paris, then did a PhD in Molecular Biophysics at the Nuclear Energy Research Center, Saclay, France, followed by a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. She obtained an EMBO Young Investigator award in 2001, a Howard Hughes International Scholar award in 2005 and the Swiss Prix Marcel Benoist in 2009, the same year she was elected EMBO member (European Molecular Biology Organisation). She is a leader in the fields of molecular and cellular understanding of bacterial toxins, the organization of mammalian membranes and in organelles biology. Professor van der Goot is member of diverse scientific boards such as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), the Conseil suisse de la science et de la technologie (CSST) and the European Research Council (ERC).
Anna Carratala Ripolles
During my PhD, I mainly focused on characterizing the effect of environmental factors (namely temperature and sunlight) and disinfectants on the stability of human viral pathogens as contaminants of aquatic environments. In addition,I developed a novel source tracking tool to identify avian fecal contamination in environmental samples. Thanks to a research fellowship given by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, I also had the opportunity to explore the diversity of marine viruses in Mediterranean coastal waters by genetic fingerprinting and by next generation sequencing. Later on, I became interested in the long-term effect of environmental stressors on virus communities, so I joined the LCE as a postdoc to investigate the adaptation of enteroviruses to ultraviolet radiation. For 4 years, I worked on developing UV-resistant viruses and characterizing their acquired phenotypic and genetic properties by combining directed evolution experiments, deep sequencing and population genetics. Out of the lab, I am passionate about nature, traveling and scuba diving.