Bruno Emanuel Ferreira De Sousa CorreiaThroughout my PhD and postdoctoral studies I was trained in world-renowned laboratories and institutions in the United States of America (University of Washington and The Scripps Research Institute). Very early in my scientific career I found out my fascination about protein structure and function. My PhD studies evolved in the direction of immunogen design and vaccine engineering which sparked my interest in the many needs and opportunities in vaccinology and translational research. My efforts resulted in an enlightening piece of work where for the first time, computationally designed immunogens elicited potent neutralizing antibodies. During my postdoctoral studies I joined a chemical biology laboratory at the Scripps Research Institute. In this stage I developed novel chemoproteomics methods for the identification of protein-small molecule interaction sites in complex proteomes. In March 2015, I joined the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland as a tenure track assistant professor. The focus of my research group is to develop computational tools for protein design with particular emphasis in applying these strategies to immunoengineering (e.g. vaccine and cancer immunotherapy). The activities in my laboratory focus on computational design methods development and experimental characterization of the designed proteins. Our laboratory has been awarded with 2 prestigious research grants from the European Research Council. Lastly, I have been awarded the prize for best teacher of Life sciences in 2019.
Joachim LingnerPhD at the Biocenter, University of Basel 1989-1992 (Supervisor: Walter Keller). Postdoc at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Colorado at Boulder 1993-1997 (Supervisor: Thomas Cech). Junior group leader at ISREC 1997-2001. Senior group leader at ISREC since 2002. Associate Professor at EPFL 2005-2008. Full Professor at EPFL since 2009. Honors: START-fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation in 1997; Friedrich Miescher Prize from the Swiss Society of Biochemistry in 2002; EMBO member in 2005; ERC advanced investigator grant in 2008.
Julien Maillard2011 - present: Research associate at the Laboratory for Environmental Biotechnology (LBE, IIE-ENAC, EPFL)
2007 - 2010: Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Environmental Biotechnology (LBE, IIE-ENAC, EPFL)
2005 - 2006: Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UEA, Norwich, UK)
2000 - 2004: PhD thesis at the Laboratory for Environmental Biotechnology (LBE)
1995 - 2000: B.sc & M.sc at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology, Zurich (ETHZ)
Gerardo TurcattiSenior scientific level (R&D) with extensive experience in the management of multidisciplinary technological projects. Prof. Gerardo Turcatti, directs the academic technological platform, Biomolecular Screening Facility (BSF) at the EPFL he created in 2006. In the framework of the NCCR-Chemical Biology, he is project leader of the program ACCESS (An Academic Chemical Screening Platform for Switzerland). Previously he co-founded and acted as CTO of Manteia S.A., a Swiss-based company that developed high throughput DNA sequencing technologies currently owned by Illumina and used in the ‘Next Generation Sequencing’ instruments. Prior to this experience, Prof. Turcatti had a long multidisciplinary career in R&D divisions of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies with extensive expertise in several Chemical Biology-related disciplines such as Drug Screening, Chemical Biology, Bio-analytical Chemistry, DNA and Protein Chemistry. Prof. Turcatti earned his Master in Chemical Engineering at the University of Geneva and his PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the EPFL where he received the award for the best doctoral thesis of the year.
Martinus GijsMartin A.M. Gijs received his degree in physics in 1981 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and his Ph.D. degree in physics at the same university in 1986. He joined the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1987. Subsequently, he has worked there on micro-and nano-fabrication processes of high critical temperature superconducting Josephson and tunnel junctions, the microfabrication of microstructures in magnetic multilayers showing the giant magnetoresistance effect, the design and realisation of miniaturised motors for hard disk applications and the design and realisation of planar transformers for miniaturised power applications. He joined EPFL in 1997. His present interests are in developing technologies for novel magnetic devices, new microfabrication technologies for microsystems fabrication in general and the development and use of microsystems technologies for microfluidic and biomedical applications in particular.
