Aleksandra Ardaseva joins EPFL as an Ambizione Fellow

The SNSF Ambizione grants are aimed at early career researchers from Switzerland and abroad “who wish to conduct, manage and lead an independent project at a Swiss higher education institution.”

“The Ambizione Fellowship enables me to establish my own research group and pursue an independent academic career,” says Aleksandra Ardaseva, who has joined EPFL’s School of Life Sciences as the latest Ambizione Fellow, hosted by the lab of Professor Anne-Florence Bitbol.

Originally trained in mathematics, Ardaseva's research combines physics, mathematics, and biology to understand how living systems adapt, evolve, and self-organize across scales. Before joining EPFL, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique in Grenoble and as a MSCA Fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute (Denmark).

Ardaseva's Ambizione project, Adaptive Active Matter, aims to bridge the eco-evolutionary dynamics and theory of active matter. In particular, she will investigate how environmental-cell interactions shape phenotypic landscapes and select different mechanical properties within cell populations.

More broadly, her work focuses on computational modelling of biological processes at different scales, from single-cell phenomena to collective behaviour of several cell populations.

For Aleksandra, EPFL offers a unique environment for this work. “As my research bridges physics, mathematics, and biology, EPFL is an ideal place to develop it within a diverse and interdisciplinary scientific environment,” she says.