Cathrin BriskenCathrin Brisken, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Life Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Dr. Brisken is internationally recognized for her work on endocrine control of mammary gland development and breast carcinogenesis.
Dr. Brisken received her MD and her PhD degree in Biophysics from the Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany. She completed her postdoctoral work in cancer biology with Dr. R.A. Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, USA. She previously held appointments at the Cancer Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC).
Research in Dr. Brisken’s laboratory focuses on the cellular and molecular underpinnings of estrogen and progesterone receptor signaling in the breast and the respective roles of these hormones and hormonally active compounds in carcinogenesis. The aim is to understand how recurrent exposures to endogenous and exogenous hormones contribute to breast carcinogenesis in order to better prevent and treat the disease. The laboratory has pioneered in vivo approaches to genetically dissect the role of the reproductive hormones in driving mouse mammary gland development and shown how they control intercellular communication. Dr. Brisken’s group has developed ex vivo and humanized mouse models using patient samples to study hormone action in human tissues in normal settings and during disease progression.
Dr. Brisken is member of the International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG) Biological Protocol Working Group. She served as Dean of EPFL Doctoral School (more than 2000 PhD students in 18 PhD programs), as member of the Hinterzartener Kreis, the oncology think-tank associated with the German Science Foundation, and numerous Swiss, European, and AACR committees. She co-founded the International Cancer Prevention Institute.
Kathryn Hess BellwaldKathryn Hess Bellwald received her PhD from MIT in 1989 and held positions at the universities of Stockholm, Nice, and Toronto before moving to the EPFL.Her research focuses on algebraic topology and its applications, primarily in the life sciences, but also in materials science. She has published extensively on topics in pure algebraic topology including homotopy theory, operad theory, and algebraic K-theory. On the applied side, she has elaborated methods based on topological data analysis for high-throughput screening of nanoporous crystalline materials, classification and synthesis of neuron morphologies, and classification of neuronal network dynamics. She has also developed and applied innovative topological approaches to network theory, leading to a powerful, parameter-free mathematical framework relating the activity of a neural network to its underlying structure, both locally and globally.In 2016 she was elected to Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a distinguished speaker of the European Mathematical Society in 2017. In 2021 she gave an invited Public Lecture at the European Congress of Mathematicians. She has won several teaching prizes at EPFL, including the Crédit Suisse teaching prize and the Polysphère d’Or.
Michael Christoph GastparMichael Gastpar is a (full) Professor at EPFL. From 2003 to 2011, he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, earning his tenure in 2008. He received his Dipl. El.-Ing. degree from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 1997 and his MS degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA, in 1999. He defended his doctoral thesis at EPFL on Santa Claus day, 2002. He was also a (full) Professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research interests are in network information theory and related coding and signal processing techniques, with applications to sensor networks and neuroscience. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the co-recipient of the 2013 Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award. He was an Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer (2009-2011). He won an ERC Starting Grant in 2010, an Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2008, an NSF CAREER award in 2004, and the 2002 EPFL Best Thesis Award. He has served as an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2008-11), and as Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2010 International Symposium on Information Theory, Austin, TX.
Mark PaulyMark Pauly is a full professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL. Prior to joining EPFL, he was assistant professor at the CS department of ETH Zurich since April 2005. From August 2003 to March 2005 he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he also held a position as visiting assistant professor during the summer of 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree (with distinction) in 2003 from ETH Zurich and his M.S. degree (with highest honors) in 1999 from TU Kaiserslautern. His research interests include computer graphics and animation, shape modeling and analysis, geometry processing, architectural geometry, and digital fabrication. He received the ETH medal for outstanding dissertation, was awarded the Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2006 and the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award in 2016.
