Bart Deplancke, new Dean of the School of Life Sciences

Bart Deplancke graduated as a Biochemical Engineer at Ghent University (Belgium, 1998) after which he pursued doctoral studies in Immunobiology at the University of Illinois (USA) and postdoctoral work in Regulatory Genomics at the Harvard and UMass Medical Schools (USA). In 2007, he established his lab at the EPFL School of Life Sciences where he is now a Full Professor and former Vice-Dean of Innovation. There, he is developing new, often single cell-related technologies to study how the genome mediates cellular and organismal phenotypic diversity, especially in a metabolic context, resulting in >150 peer-reviewed publications to date in well-recognized peer-reviewed journals. In 2013, he became a Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Group Leader; in 2017, he was elected to the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); in 2021, he received the Cloëtta Prize for outstanding contributions to biomedical research; in 2022, the Leenaards Prize for Biomedical Translational Research as well as an SNSF Advanced Grant (ERC equivalent); in 2023, he was awarded EMBO membership; and in 2026 the International Francqui Professor Chair prize. He is also the co-founder of two Biotech companies (Genohm, Acquired by Agilent in 2018; and Alithea Genomics).

The Executive Board warmly thanks Andy Oates, Dean of the School of Life Sciences for the past six years, for his dedication to SV and to EPFL. Under his leadership, SV strengthened its role as a catalyst for life sciences at the interface of engineering, computation and health; developed shared research capabilities for modern biology, including the Stem Cell and Organoid Laboratory; advanced interdisciplinary education through initiatives such as Neuro-X; and helped position EPFL in emerging areas of bioengineering, bio-imaging and human health.