Neuroscience Reconstructed: Genetics and Development

Johannes Gräff

Dr

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Johannes Gräff was born and raised in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, in St. Gallen. After high school, he moved across the language boarder to the French-speaking University of Lausanne, where he completed his undergraduate studies. During those, he spent one year at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in Vancouver, Canada, where he started to become interested in neuroscience and psychology. His M.Sc. thesis, conducted with Laurent Keller in 2005, then focused on the genetic causes of aging in ants. Intrigued by how genes can influence behavior – and vice versa – he started a Ph.D. thesis in the lab of Isabelle Mansuy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETHZ) to specialize on the neuroepigenetic mechanisms that regulate learning and memory. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2009, and stayed on for a short while as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2009, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA to start his postdoctoral work under the supervision of Li-Huei Tsai. During this time, he could for the first time show that the epigenetic machinery is causally involved in cognitive decline associated with neurodegeneration, as well as with updating long-term traumatic memories in a mouse model of post-traumatic stress disorder. Since 2013, Johannes Gräff is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Brain Mind Institute of the School of Life Sciences, and the Nestle Chair for Neurosciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He is also a founding member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence, a MQ fellow, a NARSAD Independent Investigator and holds an ERC StG.

Gioele La Manno

Dr

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Gioele La Manno earned his PhD at Karolinska Instituet and is a proud alumnus of the Linnarsson Lab. His original training is in Biotechnology (BSc @UNIPA) and Biomedicine (MSc @KI) but nowadays he will turn around if somebody is calling out for a Molecular Biologist, Computational Biologist or Bioinformatician. His research focuses on understanding brain development. He is particularly interested in describing the sequence of states that embryonic stem cells go through during their differentiation towards mature neurons. He has been tackling this question using machine learning tools on the wealth of data provided by single cell RNA sequencing, a technique he has been working with and developing since its early times. His long-term goal is to contribute in making biology from a descriptive to a predictive science.

Liliane Tenenbaum

Dr

University of LAusanne

Liliane Tenenbaum is a Senior Lecturer and Group Leader in the Laboratoire de neurothérapies et neuromodulation at the University of Lausanne. Her research interests are Neuroprotective gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease and sensing and reducing brain inflammatory responses.

Elsa Pellet

Dr

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

After a master in life sciences at the EPF in Lausanne, Switzerland, Elsa chose to do a Ph.D. (or, more exactly, a Dr. rer. nat.) in systems immunology. Working in two labs, one theoretical, the other experimental, allowed he to combine an experimental approach to a modelling approach, and to learn how to integrate the two aspects of biological research. The combination of experimental and computational work is important, and communication difficulties between the two fields are a non-negligible impairment in biological research. Her position at the intersection of both fields allows her to reduce those difficulties by understanding both the data requirement of system biologists, the experimental needs of experimentalists, and by being able to explain mathematical models in biological terms and biological restrictions in practical terms.

Sean Hill

Professor

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Sean Lewis Hill is an American neuroscientist, Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, and inaugural Scientific Director of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics in Toronto, Canada. He is co-Director of the Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne located on the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland. He is known for the development of large-scale computational models of brain circuitry and neuroinformatics.