Hatice Altug2020-current Full Professor at the Institute of Bioengineering, EPFL, Switzerland2013-2020 Associate Professor (with tenure) at the Institute of Bioengineering, EPFL, Switzerland 2013 Associate Professor (with tenure) at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Boston University, USA 2007-2013 Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Boston University, USA 2007 Post-doctoral Fellow at Center for Engineering in Medicine of Harvard Medical School, USA 2000-2007 PhD. in Applied Physics at Stanford University, USA 1996-2000 B.S. in Physics at Bilkent University, Turkey
Katrin BeyerSince 2017 Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), EPFL. Head of the Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (EESD) Laboratory
2010-2017 Assistant Professor, EPFL.
2008-2010 Post-doctoral researcher, ETH Zürich.
2003-2007 Ph.D., Roseschool / Università di Pavia, Italy.
2001-2003 Ove Arup & Partners, Advanced Technology and Research Group, London.
2001 Diploma, Civil engineering, ETH Zürich.
Esther AmstadEsther Amstad studied material science at ETH in Zurich. She also carried out her PhD thesis at the same University under the supervision of Prof. Marcus Textor; for her thesis, she worked on the surface modification and steric stabilization of oxide nanoparticles. As a postdoctoral fellow, she joined the experimental condensed soft matter group of David A. Weitz at Harvard University where she used droplet based microfluidics to assemble different types of functional micro- and nanomaterials. In addition, she developped new microfluidic devices that enable the production of very small, airborne drops as well as devices that produce highly monodisperse emulsion drops at a very high throughput. In June 2014, Esther joined the material science department (IMX) of EPFL where she is leading the Soft Materials Laboratory (SMAL).
Simon Nessim HeneinSimon Henein obtient son diplôme d’ingénieur en microtechnique de l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) en 1996, puis le titre de docteur ès sciences techniques de cette même institution en 2000. En 2001 il publie un livre intitulé « Conception des guidages flexibles » qui devient une référence dans le monde de la conception micromécanique. Ce livre sera traduit en anglais et complété dans un ouvrage collectif intitulé "The art of flexure mechanism design" publié en 2017.Simon Henein s’engage ensuite professionnellement au Centre Suisse d’Electronique et Microtechnique (CSEM) où il conçoit et développe des mécanismes dédiés à des applications robotiques, spatiales, astrophysique, biomédicales et horlogères, ainsi qu’à l’Institut Paul Scherrer où il développe des instruments pour le synchrotron suisse SLS. Depuis le 1er novembre 2012, il est professeur associé en microtechnique à l’EPFL et directeur du Laboratoire de conception micromécanique et horlogère (Instant-Lab). De 2020 à 2021 il effectue un congé de recherche en tant que professeur invité au Centre d'études théâtrales de l'Université de Lausanne (faculté des lettres).
Sandro CarraraSandro Carrara a été nommé IEEE Fellow pour ses remarquables réalisations dans le domaine de la conception de biocapteurs CMOS à l'échelle nanométrique. Il a également reçu le prix "IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award" en 2016 pour son leadership dans le domaine émergent du co-design des interfaces Bio/Nano/CMOS. Il est un Professeur titulaire à l' EPFL à Lausanne (Suisse) et responsable du groupe de recherche "Bio/CMOS Interfaces" (BCI). Il est ancien professeur de biocapteurs optiques et électriques au Département de génie électrique et de biophysique (DIBE) de l'Université de Gênes (Italie) et ancien professeur de nanotechnologie à l'Université de Bologne (Italie). Il est titulaire d'un doctorat en biochimie et de biophysique de l'Université de Padoue (Italie), une master en physique de l'Université de Gênes (Italie), et un diplôme en électronique de l'Institut National de Technologie à Albenga (Italie). Ses intérêts scientifiques sont sur les phénomènes électriques de films nano-bio-structuré, et comprennent CMOS conception de biopuces à base de protéines et de l'ADN. Le long de sa carrière, il a publié 7 livres, l'un comme auteur avec Springer sur les interfaces Bio/CMOS et, plus récemment, un manuel de bioélectronique avec La prestigieuse Cambridge University Press. Il a également publié plus de 250 articles scientifiques et est l'auteur de 13 brevets. Il est maintenant chef rédacteur du Journal IEEE Sensors; il est également fondateur et chef rédacteur du Journal BioNanoScience par Springer, et rédacteur adjoint de IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Biomedical Systems. Il est membre du IEEE Sensors Council et de son comité exécutif. Il était membre du Conseil des gouverneurs de la IEEE Circuits And Systems Society (CASS). Il a été nommé IEEE conférencier émérite pour les années 2017-2019 pour le Conseil IEEE Sensors, et de la société CASS pour les années 2013-2014. Son travail a reçu plusieurs reconnaissances internationales: plusieurs Top-25 Hottest-articles (2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, et deux fois en 2012) publiés dans des journaux internationales très fort impact telles que Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Sensors And Actuators B, IEEE Sensors, et Thin Solid Films; un Award à une conference de l'OTAN en 1996 pour la contribution originale à la physique de la conductivité à électron unique dans les nano-particules; six "Best Paper Awards" pour des articles présentés à la conférence IEEE Sensors Conference en 2019 (Montreal), IEEE NGCAS en 2017 (Genoa), MOBIHEALTH en 2016 (Milan), IEEE PRIME en 2015 (Glasgow), en 2010 (Berlin) et en 2009 (Cork), un prix de la meilleure affiche au rencontre annuel de Nanotera en 2011 (Berne), et un prix de la meilleure affiche au NanoEurope Symposium en 2009 (Rapperswil). De 1997 à 2000, il a été membre d'un comité international au ELETTRA Synchrotron à Trieste. De 2000 à 2003, il était responsable scientifique d'un Programme national de recherche (PNR) dans le dépôt de nanobiotechnologie. Il était un expert internationalement estimé du comité d'évaluation de l'Académie de Finlande dans un programme de recherche pour les années 2010-2013. Il a été le président général (General Chair) de la Conférence IEEE BioCAS 2014, le premier conférence internationale dans le domaine des circuits et des systèmes pour les applications biomédicales.
Henry MarkramHenry Markram started a dual scientific and medical career at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. His scientific work in the 80s revealed the polymodal receptive fields of pontomedullary reticular formation neurons in vivo and how acetylcholine re-organized these sensory maps.
He moved to Israel in 1988 and obtained his PhD at the Weizmann Institute where he discovered a link between acetylcholine and memory mechanisms by being the first to show that acetylcholine modulates the NMDA receptor in vitro studies, and thereby gates which synapses can undergo synaptic plasticity. He was also the first to characterize the electrical and anatomical properties of the cholinergic neurons in the medial septum diagonal band.
He carried out a first postdoctoral study as a Fulbright Scholar at the NIH, on the biophysics of ion channels on synaptic vesicles using sub-fractionation methods to isolate synaptic vesicles and patch-clamp recordings to characterize the ion channels. He carried out a second postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute, as a Minerva Fellow, where he discovered that individual action potentials propagating back into dendrites also cause pulsed influx of Ca2 into the dendrites and found that sub-threshold activity could also activated a low threshold Ca2 channel. He developed a model to show how different types of electrical activities can divert Ca2 to activate different intracellular targets depending on the speed of Ca2 influx an insight that helps explain how Ca2 acts as a universal second messenger. His most well known discovery is that of the millisecond watershed to judge the relevance of communication between neurons marked by the back-propagating action potential. This phenomenon is now called Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which many laboratories around the world have subsequently found in multiple brain regions and many theoreticians have incorporated as a learning rule. At the Max-Planck he also started exploring the micro-anatomical and physiological principles of the different neurons of the neocortex and of the mono-synaptic connections that they form - the first step towards a systematic reverse engineering of the neocortical microcircuitry to derive the blue prints of the cortical column in a manner that would allow computer model reconstruction.
He received a tenure track position at the Weizmann Institute where he continued the reverse engineering studies and also discovered a number of core principles of the structural and functional organization such as differential signaling onto different neurons, models of dynamic synapses with Misha Tsodyks, the computational functions of dynamic synapses, and how GABAergic neurons map onto interneurons and pyramidal neurons. A major contribution during this period was his discovery of Redistribution of Synaptic Efficacy (RSE), where he showed that co-activation of neurons does not only alter synaptic strength, but also the dynamics of transmission. At the Weizmann, he also found the tabula rasa principle which governs the random structural connectivity between pyramidal neurons and a non-random functional connectivity due to target selection. Markram also developed a novel computation framework with Wolfgang Maass to account for the impact of multiple time constants in neurons and synapses on information processing called liquid computing or high entropy computing.
In 2002, he was appointed Full professor at the EPFL where he founded and directed the Brain Mind Institute. During this time Markram continued his reverse engineering approaches and developed a series of new technologies to allow large-scale multi-neuron patch-clamp studies. Markrams lab discovered a novel microcircuit plasticity phenomenon where connections are formed and eliminated in a Darwinian manner as apposed to where synapses are strengthening or weakened as found for LTP. This was the first demonstration that neural circuits are constantly being re-wired and excitation can boost the rate of re-wiring.
At the EPFL he also completed the much of the reverse engineering studies on the neocortical microcircuitry, revealing deeper insight into the circuit design and built databases of the blue-print of the cortical column. In 2005 he used these databases to launched the Blue Brain Project. The BBP used IBMs most advanced supercomputers to reconstruct a detailed computer model of the neocortical column composed of 10000 neurons, more than 340 different types of neurons distributed according to a layer-based recipe of composition and interconnected with 30 million synapses (6 different types) according to synaptic mapping recipes. The Blue Brain team built dozens of applications that now allow automated reconstruction, simulation, visualization, analysis and calibration of detailed microcircuits. This Proof of Concept completed, Markrams lab has now set the agenda towards whole brain and molecular modeling.
With an in depth understanding of the neocortical microcircuit, Markram set a path to determine how the neocortex changes in Autism. He found hyper-reactivity due to hyper-connectivity in the circuitry and hyper-plasticity due to hyper-NMDA expression. Similar findings in the Amygdala together with behavioral evidence that the animal model of autism expressed hyper-fear led to the novel theory of Autism called the Intense World Syndrome proposed by Henry and Kamila Markram. The Intense World Syndrome claims that the brain of an Autist is hyper-sensitive and hyper-plastic which renders the world painfully intense and the brain overly autonomous. The theory is acquiring rapid recognition and many new studies have extended the findings to other brain regions and to other models of autism.
Markram aims to eventually build detailed computer models of brains of mammals to pioneer simulation-based research in the neuroscience which could serve to aggregate, integrate, unify and validate our knowledge of the brain and to use such a facility as a new tool to explore the emergence of intelligence and higher cognitive functions in the brain, and explore hypotheses of diseases as well as treatments.
David Atienza AlonsoDavid Atienza Alonso is an associate professor of EE and director of the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science and engineering from UCM, Spain, and IMEC, Belgium, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. His research interests include system-level design methodologies for multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) servers and edge AI architectures. Dr. Atienza has co-authored more than 350 papers, one book, and 12 patents in these previous areas. He has also received several recognitions and award, among them, the ICCAD 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award in 2020, Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, the IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He has also earned two best paper awards at the VLSI-SoC 2009 and CST-HPCS 2012 conference, and five best paper award nominations at the DAC 2013, DATE 2013, WEHA-HPCS 2010, ICCAD 2006, and DAC 2004 conferences. He serves or has served as associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Computers (TC), IEEE Design & Test of Computers (D&T), IEEE Trans. on CAD (T-CAD), IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (T-SUSC), and Elsevier Integration. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. He served as President of IEEE CEDA in the period 2018-2019 and was GOLD member of the Board of Governors of IEEE CASS from 2010 to 2012. He is a Distinguished Member of ACM and an IEEE Fellow.
