Vassily HatzimanikatisDr. Vassily Hatzimanikatis is currently Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vassily received a PhD and an MS in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the University of Patras, in Greece. After the completion of his doctoral studies, he held a research group leader position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, Vassily worked for three years in DuPont, Cargill, and Cargill Dow, and he has been assistant professor at Northwestern University, at Illinois, USA.
Vassilys research interests are in the areas of computational systems biology, biotechnology, and complexity. He is associate editor of the journals Biotechnology & Bioengineering, Metabolic Engineering and Integrative Biology, and he serves on the editorial advisory board of the journals Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology, and Industrial Biotechnology. He has written over 70 technical publications and he is co-inventor in three patents and patent applications.
Vassily is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2010), he was a DuPont Young Professor (2001-2004), and he has also received the Jay Bailey Young Investigator Award in Metabolic Engineering (2000), and the ACS Elmar Gaden Award (2011).
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.
Patrick Daniel BarthProfessor Patrick Barth is Associate Professor at EPFL and Adjunct Associate Professor at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA. He received training in Physics, Chemistry and Biology (University of Paris, ENS) in France and performed his PhD at the Commissiariat a l'Energie Atomique in Saclay, France on structure/function studies of membrane proteins (photosystem I) using biochemical and biophysical experimental techniques. He carried out postdoctoral studies at University of California at Berkeley with Tom Alber on computational development for calculating protein electrostatics and designing de novo selective peptide inhibitors of cellular protein interactions. He then went to the University of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow and instructor in David Baker's laboratory to develop computational techniques in the software Rosetta for predicting and designing membrane protein structures. He started his independent career and received tenure at Baylor College of Medicine. He will continue at EPFL to marry computation and experiment for understanding the molecular determinants of signal transduction, as well as modeling and designing membrane proteins with novel functions for various synthetic biology and therapeutic applications.
