David Suter Wins SNSF Sinergia Grant

David Suter. Credit: Alain Herzog

David Suter. Credit: Alain Herzog

Professor David Suter (EPFL, Institute of Bioengineering) has been awarded a Sinergia grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, shared with Sebastian Maerkl (EPFL, Institute of Bioengineering) and Erik van Nimwegen (University of Basel).

The SNSF Sinergia grants promote “interdisciplinary collaboration between two to four applicants whose project involves breakthrough research.” Given each year to researchers across disciplines, the Sinergia grants qualify breakthrough research as that which “calls into question or goes beyond existing models, theories, doctrines, research approaches, methods, etc.”

One of the 2019 Sinergia grants has been awarded to Professor David Suter at EPFL’s Institute of Bioengineering (IBI). The grant, which is almost 2.5 million CHF, will fund a collaborative research project between Suter’s group, the lab of Sebastian Maerkl, also at the IBI, and the lab of Erik van Nimwegen at the University of Basel.

The project is titled “A quantitative approach to transcriptional network dynamics” and proposes “a combination of in vivo and in vitro single-cell biophysical measurement approaches together with theoretical modelling, to bridge the gap between qualitative topological network models and realistic biophysical models of the stochastic gene regulatory dynamics in individual cells.”