Interviews at EPFL

During the last week of January I had the chance to enter the hiring program of EPFL’s edcb program.

There I spent four days with many PIs and around twice as much students 👩‍🎓👨‍🎓 all over the world interested in computational biology🧪 . Each of them were extremely bright.

Lausanne is this unique place at the center of Europe where you feel a similar atmosphere of entrepreneurship and enthusiasm and research as one would in the US.

Here I had the chance to meet with many great researchers such as Pr. Naef working on answering fundamental questions on cellular rhythms. Pr. La Manno who tries to understand the dynamics of cellular differentiation through methods of RNA velocity. Pr. Rahi which tries to model the dynamical interaction of interaction networks in cells. Pr. Barth which is using knowledge in protein conformation to membrane receptors applying it to cancer research and immunotherapies. Pr. Manley, which is using methods of super-resolution microscopy to see more about cells and proteins.

As usual most of them were initially trained physicists. Each of them had specific projects using machine learning which I have been able to relate to a lot.

I also had the chance to present my past research projects (that you can find on this website) and which slides are available online: here. It seems that the researchers had a good interest in me and my background which made me very proud and enthusiastic. Moreover I love skiing🎿 and Lausanne is 45mns away from “les pistes”. (Which is a nice 👍 added bonus right?).