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. Marianne LiebiMarianne Liebi is Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPF Lausanne and head of the Laboratory for X-ray characterization of materials (cam-X) and the group “
Structure and Mechanics of Advanced Materials
” at PSI. She has been appointed in 2021 at EPFL where she is part of the Institute of Materials within the School of Engineering. Marianne Liebi studied Food Science at ETH Zurich where she also obtained her PhD in 2013 in the Laboratory of Food Process Engineering lead by Prof. Erich J. Windhab. Within this project started using small-angle neutron scattering at PSI for the characterization of soft-matter, namely of magnetic alignable self-assembly structures. As a Postdoc in the coherent X-ray scattering group at the Swiss Light Source she worked from 2013-2016 on method development in SAXS tensor tomography. In 2016 she moved to Sweden where after a short period at the NanoMAX beamline, MAXIV Laboratory, Lund she started her own research group in 2017 as Assistant Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, and became Docent in Physics in spring 2020. She kept her affiliation at Chalmers University of Technology, where still part of her group is located (
Liebi research group
) when moving back to Switzerland in 2020 where she was Scientific Group Leader in the Center for X-ray Analytics at Empa, St.Gallen, before starting the joint position between EPFL and PSI in November 2021.
Michael GraetzelProfessor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC). DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in building integrated photovoltaics. They engendered perovskite solar cells (PSCs) which turned into the most exciting break-through in the history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. His over 1500 publications have received some 220’000 citations with an h-factor of 218 (SI-Web of Science) demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.
Alfredo PasquarelloAlfredo Pasquarello effectue ses études en physique à l'Ecole normale supérieure de Pise et à l'Université de Pise et obtient leurs diplômes respectifs en 1986. Il obtient le titre de Docteur ès sciences à l'EPFL en 1991 avec une thèse portant sur les transitions à plusieurs photons dans les solides. Ensuite, il effectue des recherches post-doctorales aux Laboratoires Bell (Murray Hill, New Jersey) sur les propriétés magnétiques des fullerènes de carbone. En 1993, il rejoint l'Institut romand de recherche numérique en physique des matériaux (IRRMA), où sa recherche porte sur des méthodes de simulation ab initio. En 1998, le Prix Latsis de l'EPFL lui est decerné pour son travail de recherche portant sur les matériaux à base de silice désordonnée. Bénéficiant de plusieurs subsides du Fonds National, il constitue ensuite sa propre équipe de recherche à l'IRRMA. En juillet 2003, il est nommé Professeur en Physique théorique de la matière condensée à l'EPFL. Actuellement, il dirige la Chaire de simulation à l'échelle atomique.
Dario FloreanoProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2010, he is the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that brings together more than 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly.com and Flyability.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). Books
Manuale sulle Reti Neurali, il Mulino (in Italian), 1996 (first edition), 2006 (second edition)Evolutionary Robotics, MIT Press, 2000
Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 2008
Flying Insects and Robots, Springer Verlag, 2010
Berend SmitBerend Smit received an MSc in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and an MSc in Physics both from the Technical University in Delft (the Netherlands). He received in 1990 cum laude PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He was a (senior) Research Physicists at Shell Research from 1988-1997, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 1997-2007.
In 2004 Berend Smit was elected Director of the European Center of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) Lyon France. Since 2007 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley and Faculty Chemist at Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2014 he has been director of the Energy Center at EPFL.
Philippe SpätigPhilippe Spätig is currently Adjunct Professor at EPFL in the School of Basic Sciences, in the Laboratory of Reactor Physics and Systems Behaviours. He obtained his diploma of Engineer Physicist at EPFL in 1991 and his PhD at EPFL in 1995 on the role of thermal activation in the plasticity of the intermetallic Ni3Al. From 1995 to 1997, he worked as postdoc in the Materials Group of the Center for Research in Plasma Physics at EPFL, studying the effects of high-energy proton irradiation on alloys and pure metals. He then moved to the University of California Santa Barbara and spent two years in the group of Professor G.R. Odette, working on fracture mechanics of ferritic structural steels. He joined again the Materials Group of the Center for Research in Plasma Physics at EPFL in 2000 and worked in this group until the end of 2012. His research was focused on irradiation hardening and embrittlement of steels, as well as on the development of oxide dispersion strengthened steels. He also worked and developed experimental and analytical small specimen test techniques to reliably extract mechanical properties from limited material volume. In 2013, he joined the Laboratory for Nuclear Materials at Paul Scherrer Institute, while being associated with the Laboratory for Reactor Physics and System Behaviours at EPFL. Since then he mainly works on environmentally-assisted fatigue and fracture on austenitic and pressure vessel steels, where the effects of light water reactor environment on mechanical properties are investigated.
Francesco StellacciFrancesco 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.
