Maria Giulia PretiMaria Giulia Preti received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) in 2013, after her M. Sc. (2009) and B. Sc. (2007) in Biomedical Engineering, as well at Politecnico di Milano. During her Ph.D., mentored by Prof. Giuseppe Baselli, she focused on advanced techniques of brain magnetic resonance imaging, in particular she developed a method of groupwise fMRI-guided tractography, that revealed to be useful in the in-vivo investigation of the pathophysiological changes across the evolution of Alzheimers disease. For this project, she had been collaborating full-time with the hospital Fondazione Don Gnocchi in Milan (Magnetic Resonance Laboratory). In 2011, she was awarded a Progetto Rocca fellowship from MIT-Italy and spent a visiting research period at the MIT and Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), under the supervision of Prof. Nikos Makris, where she could focus on the anatomical study of specific neruonal bundles.
She has joined Prof. Van De Ville group at EPFL as a post-doc in 2013. Her current research aims at understanding the connections between brain functionality and brain microscopic anatomy by using advanced techniques of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In particular, she is working on functional MRI, functional connectivity, diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, integration of MRI with other techniques (e.g. EEG), and the application of these methods to several clinical contexts, e.g., epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, multiple sclerosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Anders MeibomAnders Meibom obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Southern Denmark in 1997. This was followed by two and a half years of PostDoc work at the Hawaii Institute for Geophysics and Planetology, where he conducted mineralogical studies of primitive chondritic meteorites. From 2000 to 2005, he was Research Associate in the Geological & Environmental Sciences, Stanford University, where he represented Stanford in the USGS-Stanford ion microprobe laboratory. In 2005, he became proifessor at the Muséum National dHistoire Naturelle in Paris. From 2006 to 2011 he was the director of the French national NanoSIMS laboratory. Since January 2012, he is professor at the EPFL in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). From April 2014, he is professor ad personam at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne.
Jean-Philippe ThiranJean-Philippe Thiran was born in Namur, Belgium, in August 1970. He received the Electrical Engineering degree and the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1993 and 1997, respectively. From 1993 to 1997, he was the co-ordinator of the medical image analysis group of the Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory at UCL, mainly working on medical image analysis. Dr Jean-Philippe Thiran joined the Signal Processing Institute (ITS) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in February 1998 as a senior lecturer. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 2004, to Associate Professor in 2011 and is now a Full Professor since 2020. He also holds a 20% position at the Department of Radiology of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) as Associate Professor ad personam. Dr Thiran's current scientific interests include
Computational medical imaging: acquisition, reconstruction and analysis of imaging data, with emphasis on regularized linear inverse problems (compressed sensing, convex optimization). Applications to medical imaging: diffusion MRI, ultrasound imaging, inverse planning in radiotherapy, etc.Computer vision & machine learning: image and video analysis, with application to facial expression recognition, eye tracking, lip reading, industrial inspection, medical image analysis, etc.
Mor-Miri MishkovskyI am a chemist, graduated Cum Laude in 2002 from Tel Aviv University in Israel. I obtained a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel on the development of new technology for rapid detection of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic data aiming at reducing the measurement time from hour to a fraction of seconds. My thesis “Methodological Developments in Ultrafast Multidimensional NMR” granted me the Auto Swartz excellence award in 2007. Since 2009 I am working with the Laboratory of Functional and Metabolic Imaging at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, on the development of hyperpolarized (HP) magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) methodologies for monitoring biochemical processes in real-time.My research is focused on the development of Magnetic Resonance (MR) Molecular Imaging by dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (dDNP). HP agents to interrogate biochemical processes in real-time are applied in vivo in the healthy brain and disease models, aiming at improving our understanding of cerebral function and metabolism toward better clinical diagnostics and therapy.
