Group members

Annick Crevoisier - Administrative Assistant

Liliane Abuin - Technician

Liliane obtained her Diplôme de Technicienne en Analyses Biomédicales from the Ecole Cantonale Vaudoise de Laborantins et Laborantines Médicaux. During 1996-2007 she worked in the group of Susanna Cotecchia in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Lausanne.

Vincent Croset - PhD Student

Vincent obtained his Bachelors in Biology in 2007 from the University of Lausanne. He joined the lab in February 2008 for a research project as part of his Masters in Genomics and Experimental Biology, for which he was awarded a "Prix de Faculté" from the Ecole de Biologie. He began his PhD research in the lab in February 2009. In May 2009, he was awarded an EMBO Short-Term Fellowship for research training in bioinformatics in Toby Gibson's group at EMBL. He was awarded a Boehringer Ingelheim PhD Fellowship in November 2009.

Raphael Rytz - PhD Student

Raphael obtained his Masters in Biology with a major in Zoology in 2006 at the University of Bern. In his Diploma thesis at the Computational and Molecular Population Genetics lab, he studied the social dynamics in a free-living common vole population. He joined the lab for his PhD research in May 2008. Raphael was awarded a Roche Research Foundation Fellowship in September 2008. Raphael successfully defended his thesis in December 2012.

Rati Bell - PhD Student

Rati obtained her MSc from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2007. Her research on the role of the thalamus on paired-associate memory was conducted with John Dalrymple-Alford and Larry Field of the Van der Veer Institute. Rati began her PhD research in the lab in August 2008, and she was awarded a fellowhip from the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds in July 2009.

Ana Silbering - Post-doctoral Fellow

Ana obtained her Masters in Biology at the University of Buenos Aires. During her PhD thesis in Giovanni Galizia's lab she studied odour coding in the olfactory system of Drosophila. She received her PhD in 2007 from the Free University of Berlin. She joined the lab in September 2008 and will focus on the characterisation of neural circuits underlying olfactory behaviour.

Carolina Gomez-Diaz - Post-doctoral Fellow

Carol obtained her Bachelors in Biology from the University of Oviedo. During her PhD thesis in Esther Alcorta's lab she studied genes involved in olfactory transduction of Drosophila melanogaster, receiving her PhD in 2009 from the University of Oviedo. Carol joined the lab in July 2009.

Pavan Ramdya - Post-doctoral Fellow

Pavan obtained his PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University in 2009. He received an HFSP Long-term post-doctoral fellowship in 2009 to study the neural mechanisms underlying behavioral evolution in the Benton lab and Dario Floreano's Intelligent Systems group at the EPFL. See his personal page for more details.

Michael Saina - Post-doctoral Fellow

Michael obtained his Masters in Biology from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He performed his PhD research at the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Bergen, Norway in the group of Ulrich Technau. He investigated the role of TGF-beta signalling during embryonic development of the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis. He joined the lab in August 2009.

Anand Sivasubramaniam - PhD Student

Anand obtained his BSc from University College London, where he did his research thesis in the lab of Stephen Hunt. He then went on to do his Msc in Charite Berlin where he worked in the lab of Gary Lewin. During the course of his studies he developed an interest in sensory transduction and will continue to pursue this field in the Drosophila chemosensory system. 

Jaime Humberto Reina Copete - Research Assistant

Jaime Reina obtained his Master degree at the University of Geneva in 2005. During his PhD thesis in the laboratory of Nouria Hernandez at the Center for Integrative Genomics, he studied the role of the human Maf1 protein as a repressor of RNA polymerase III transcription. He received his PhD degree from the University of Lausanne in 2009 and joined the lab in February 2010.

Steeve Cruchet - Technician

Steeve obtained his Diploma of Technician in Biomedical Analysis from the Ecole Cantonale Vaudoise de Laborantins et Laborantines Médicaux. From 2007 to 2010 he worked in the group of Thierry Pedrazzini in the Unity of Experimental Cardiology at the University Hospital of Lausanne. He joined the lab in March 2011.

Adria Le Boeuf - Post-doctoral Fellow

Adria obtained her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studied the contributions of microtubule dynamics to neurodegenerative disease. For her PhD work in Jim Hudspeth's lab of Sensory Neuroscience at the Rockefeller University, she studied the biophysical and mechanical contributions of electrostatics to the mechanosensory organelles of the inner ear, and was granted a National Research Service Award from the NIDCD, receiving her PhD in 2011. Since June 2011, she is pursuing her post-doctoral research jointly in our lab and that of Laurent Keller in the Department of Ecology and Evolution on ant chemosensory genetics and behavior.

Lucia Prieto Godino - Post-doctoral Fellow

Lucia obtained her B.A. from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where she did her research thesis on olfactory processing in flies in the lab of Gonzalo Garcia de Polavieja. After a summer working on vision evolution in box jellyfish in the lab of Dan Nilsson at Lund University, she joined Michael Bate's group at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. During her PhD she studied the embryonic development of the Drosophila olfactory system, receiving her PhD in 2011. She was awarded a FEBS long-term post-doctoral fellowship to study the genetic basis of olfactory pathway evolution in Drosophila in our lab. She joined the lab in March 2012. Outside the lab, Lucia founded and runs the IBRO School on Insect Neuroscience and Drosophila Neurogenetics in Uganda.

Juan Antonio Sánchez-Alcañiz - Post-doctoral Fellow

Juan obtained his MS in Biochemistry from the University Miguel Hernández of Elche (Spain). He obtained his PhD in 2010 in the lab of Prof. Óscar Marín at the Institute of Neurosciences of Alicante (Spain), studying the intracortical migration of GABAergic interneurons in the mouse neocortex. He joined the lab in August 2012 to gustatory circuitry in Drosophila, funded by EMBO, FEBS and HFSP Long Term Fellowships.

Benoîte Bargeton - Post-doctoral Fellow

Benoîte obtained her Masters in Biology at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI, FR). During her PhD thesis in Stephan Kellenberger's lab at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at UNIL she studied a mammalian neural sodium channel, and began a collaboration with our lab to study Ionotropic Receptor function in Xenopus oocytes. She continued this work in our group during Sep 2010-Feb 2011, before joining Francisco Bezanilla's lab at the University of Chicago. She return to the lab to work on our HFSP project on IR ligand recognition in Sep 2012.

Roman Arguello - Post-doctoral Fellow

Roman obtained his PhD in evolutionary genetics from the University of Chicago (Committee on Evolutionary Biology) in 2008, while working with Prof. Manyuan Long's Group. His research focused on the molecular evolution and population genetics of gene families (including chemoreceptor families) and the rarely recombining fourth chromosome in the D. melanogaster subgroup. Following his PhD, he carried out a post doc with Prof. Andrew Clark's Group at Cornell where he was involved in generating and analyzing population genomic data sets designed to investigate the forces leading to genetic and phenotypic divergence between geographically diverse D. melanogaster populations. Roman will join the lab in Jan 2013 with the aim of bridging his evolutionary genomics background with functional studies of Drosophila taste evolution. His initial interests are in the role that taste receptor duplication events play in altering sensory neural networks between species, and in the evolution of oviposition preference, supported by a Novartis Foundation grant. See his personal workpage for more info.