New Swiss Research Centers

Published:15.04.10 — The Swiss Minister Didier Burkhalter has presented eight new research centers today, the 15th of April. An important announce for research in the Lake Geneva region, it underscores the cutting-edge competences of the region’s institutions—for among the eight national projects, four are shared between institutions along the lake from Geneva to Lausanne. UNIGE, UNIL, and EPFL will benefit from around 58 million Swiss francs over the next three years from this collaboration that supports excellence in chemical biology, neuroscience, robotics, and social sciences. For more information about these National Centers of Competences in Research (NCCR), visit the website of the Federal Department of Home Affairs.

The assembly of protein strands into fibrils

Published:12.04.10 — Researchers at ETH Zürich, EPF Lausanne and at the University of Fribourg have evidenced a basic general mechanism describing how filamentous proteins assemble into ribbon like structures, the so-called Amyloid fibrils. Combining experiments and theory, they could explain how denatured milk proteins assemble into ribbon like structures composed of up to five filaments. These findings are shining a surprisingly new light on the assembly of these proteins.

The Leenaards Award 2010: EPFL Scientist Nouchine Hadjikhani among th

Published:25.03.10 — The Leenaards Award, representing a sum of 1.2 million Swiss francs, will be shared this year by two different research teams. Nouchine Hadjikhani, professor at the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL, is among the one of the teams composed of five researchers, and lead by Sébastien Jacquemont.

Navigating the Gene Pool

Published:24.03.10 — Understanding how genes interact with each other is of paramount importance in developing better gene therapies. However, current gene screening techniques cannot directly inform us how genes interact with each other. In order to better understand the biological processes of gene interaction, the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in collaboration with IBM, MIT and Harvard University, has developed a method to compare predictions and discovered a novel technique to find the best results.

The barrier shows giant variations

Published:22.01.10 — Published in "Nature Materials", the work of scientists from the Max Planck Institute, University of Trieste, King's College and EPFL provides the first local characterization of the potential barrier at the contact between a single molecule and a metal electrode. This has been achieved by combining scanning tunnelling spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations.

Stewart Cole is awarded for his work on TB

Published:08.12.09 — The Kochon Prize, which is awarded to persons, institutions, or organizations that have made a highly significant contribution to combating tuberculosis, was given to Stewart Cole, Director of the Global Health Institute at EPFL, and to Lucy Chesire, a leading international patient activist who has achieved important TB advancements at both global and regional levels, on the 5th of December this year. They will share the prize that consists of a medal and US$ 65,000.

At the Cross-roads Between Biology and Chemistry

Published:27.11.09 — The Ruzicka award was given this year to Karl Gademann – director, founder, and professor of the Chemical Synthesis Laboratory. He has been recognized for his work done in the field of natural substance synthesis. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) has awarded a sum of 10,000 Swiss francs to the professor, the highest figure in Switzerland for the field of Chemistry.