Building on last year’s symposium, also this year we commemorated our late colleague and friend Alma Dal Co, who was a professor at the Department of Computational Biology (DBC) of UNIL. In this 2nd Alma Dal Co memorial symposium six scientists who knew Alma have presented aspects of their reasearch and how they relate to her legacy.
Scheduling
10:00 – 10:15: Coffee
10:15 – 10:20: Sven Bergmann (DBC) Welcome
10:20 – 10:30: Margherita Turvani & Mario Dal Co (Alma Dal Co Foundation )
10:30 – 11:15: Uri Alon (Weizmann Institute ) Systems Medicine (remote)
11:15 – 12:00: Benjamin Towbin (Uni Bern ) Growth control from cells to organisms
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch
13:00 – 14:30: Emma Slack (ETH Zurich ) and Silvia De Monte (École Normale Supérieur e & MPI) To aggregate or not to aggregate: that is the question
14:30 – 15:00: Coffee break
15:00 – 15:45: Mor Nitzan (Hebrew University ) Robust self-organisation of multicellular structures
15:45 – 16:30: Simon van Vliet (Uni Basel & UNIL ) From molecules to communities: predicting the emergent properties of spatially structured communities
16:30 – 16:45: Closing remarks
16:45 – : Apero
Speakers
Principal investigator
Benjamin carried out a PhD in Genetics with Prof. Susan Gasser at the FMI in Switzerland, where he studied epigenetic mechanisms of gene control using C. elegans. As a postdoc, he joined the group of Prof. Uri Alon at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, studying optimality principles in bacterial growth control. Since November 2019, he has been an SNSF Eccellenza Professor at the University of Bern. In his lab, he applies quantitative systems biology approaches to study optimality principles at a multi-cellular scale using C. elegans.
Group Leader
Emma is a British/Swiss scientist who trained in Cambridge, London, Hamilton (Ontario) and Bern before joining the ETH Zürich. She is now a Professor of Mucosal Immunology at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, as well as at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, at the University of Oxford. She believes that difficult scientific problems, like understanding how the immune system in the intestine can influence microbiome composition and function, require a creative team of individuals collaborating closely across disciplines to solve them. These brilliant scientists need a safe, happy space to push the boundaries of knowledge, where they know that we are all there to support each other. So, while she still likes to get into the lab and get involved, she is also committed to leading a research group that reflects these values.
I am a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Racah Institute of Physics and the Faculty of Medicine, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I recently received the Alon Fellowship and Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship.
I was a joint John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow and James S. McDonnell Fellow at Harvard University. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, working with Prof. Nir Friedman and Prof. Aviv Regev. I did my Phd in Physics and Computational Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working with Prof. Hanah Margalit and Prof. Ofer Biham. During my PhD studies, I was a member of the Azrieli Fellows Program.
I am a researcher at the Department for Evolutionary Theory at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, where I lead the research group Dynamics of Microbial Collectives, and at the Institute of Biology of École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, in the Eco-Evo Math group.
I have always be fascinated by the collective behaviour of biological populations, and wondered how they can maintain cohesiveness and cooperation despite the possibility that individual interests disrupt their functionality. This questioning led me to (temporally) abandon a biology training for one in physics, that provided me with mathematical and methodological tools. My MsC and PhD allowed me to explore different ways of modelling the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of biological populations, and opened my eyes on the importance of individual heterogeneity in shaping collective behaviour. During my post-doc, I went back to study biology within the master program Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences, and had the opportunity to work with microbial populations. From then on, I strive to maintain the connection with observational evidence as I develop mathematical methods for the eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial collectives.
Simon van Vliet — Junior Group Leader
I am a physicist turned biologist who is fascinated by the dynamics and evolution of complex systems. I initially studied the dynamics of complex systems at the biggest (astronomy) and smallest (quantum physics) scales. However, towards the end of my Master degree I became fascinated by the complex dynamics of microbial communities, and I have worked with these microbial systems ever since. Since 2022 I am a SNSF Ambizione Fellow and lead my own subgroup at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel hosted by the lab of Knut Drescher. When not at the lab I love hiking, reading, and landscape photography, but most of all I just enjoy being out and about in the mountains.
Prof. Uri Alon is Principal investigator at the Abisch-Frenkel Professorial Chair.
Uri Alon (Hebrew: אורי אלון; born 1969) is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Alon earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
After having his interest in biology sparked, Alon headed to Princeton University for his postdoctoral work in experimental biology. He returned to the Weizmann Institute as a professor.
In 2021 he was appointed visiting professor in the bioengineering department of Stanford University. He is a member of the IBS Biomedical Mathematics Group.