Group members

Adem Bilican - PhD Student

Adem obtained his Masters degree in Bio-Informatics in 2009 at University Bordeaux 1 - France. He did a 6 months internship at BiGCaT Bioinformatics (Maastricht University - The Netherlands) where he worked on a pathway curation tool "PathVisio" and then he was employed for one and a half year at the same group as a scientific developer and worked on a web-based multi-omics platform project "Generic Study Capture Framework". He joined the group as a PhD student in January 2011.

Margarida Cardoso Moreira – Postdoctoral Fellow
Margarida did her PhD research under the supervision of Prof. Manyuan Long at the University of Chicago. Her research focused on the mutational and selective forces operating on polymorphic duplications and deletions (Copy Number Variation) in Drosophila. After completing her PhD in 2009, Margarida moved to Cornell University to work as a postdoctoral associate in the group of Prof. Andrew G. Clark. At Cornell she continued working on Copy Number Variation, focusing on the role these variants play in adaptation. Margarida joined the Kaessmann group in January 2013. She will be supported by a Novartis Foundation grant and by a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship.

Francesco Carelli - PhD Student

Francesco obtained his Master's degree in Medical
Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine at the University of
Bari (Italy) in 2010. For his thesis, he did a 1-year
internship in the group of Prof. Mario Ventura, working on
the structural and functional characterization of a primate
gene family. He joined the group as a PhD student in
September 2011.

Diego Cortez Quezada - Postdoctoral Fellow

Diego obtained his Master degree in Biology at the university of Mexico (UNAM) working with Arturo Becerra and Antonio Lazcano on the evolution of metabolic pathways in bacteria. Then, in 2005, he moved to France to start his PhD working with archaea in the BMGE lab at the Institut Pasteur and the Université Paris-Sud XI, campus Orsay. He worked with Patrick Forterre, Simonetta Gribaldo and Marie-Claude Serre to develop two projects: The first one focused on the evolution of integrative elements in archaeal genomes, and the second project established the presence of a Xer/dif system in archaea, using Pyrococcus abyssi as a model. Diego joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in April 2010.

Annick Crevoisier - Administrative assistant

Annick has been our administrative assistant since 2004.

Iris Finci - PhD Student

Iris Finci obtained her Master's degree in Molecular biology from the International Max Planck Research School at the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2010. Afterwards, she did a 6 months internship in the group of Dr. Khaitovich at the PICB (Shanghai, China) working on the establishment of a protocol for polysome isolation. She joined the group as a PhD student in August 2011.

Laure Froidevaux - Technician

Laure obtained her diploma as a lab technician (BTS) in 2001. She then worked 4 years in the cell culture service at IGBMC in Strasbourg, 6 months at the UBC Vancouver in the Ted Steiner lab, and 4 years in the HTS facility at the IGBMC in Strasbourg. Laure joined the lab in October 2011.

Katerina Guschanski - Postdoctoral Fellow

Katja obtained her PhD in 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology working in the group of Linda Vigilant on population genetics of wild mountain gorillas. She then worked as a postdoc at the Imperial College London looking at the factors affecting speciation in a group of African primates, the guenons. Katja joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in December 2010. Katja was awarded EMBO, Marie Curie and HFSP longterm postdoctoral fellowships in 2011.

Philippe Julien - Postdoctoral Fellow

Philippe first studied life sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He then obtained a bioinformatics Masters degree from the same university in september 2007 after a final traineeship in Peer Bork's group in EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany), where he worked on the eggNOG and STRING databases. He started his PhD in the lab in November 2007.

Angélica Liechti - Technician

Angélica obtained her Masters degree in Medical Biology in Stephan Kellenberger’s lab at the University of Lausanne in 2009. During her Master thesis she worked on the proton binding site in acid-sensing ion channel 1a (ASIC1a). She joined the lab as lab technician at the end 2009.

Ray Marin Florez - Postdoctoral Fellow

Ray obtained his MSc in Computational Chemistry in 2008 from the National University of Colombia, where he studied the specificity in the tRNA-aaRS recognition from a structural point of view. In 2008 he moved to the EPFL in Lausanne to start his PhD in computational biology under the supervision of Jiri Vanicek. In particular, he worked on the development ofhighly specific algorithms to predict genes regulated by microRNAs using the binding site accessibility and conservation to reduce the false discovery rate. Ray joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in October 2012.

Julien Meunier - Postdoctoral Fellow

Julien obtained his Master degree in Evolution and Biodiversity at the university of Paris VI (France) in 2002. He then did his PhD in the LBBE lab (University Lyon 1, France) under the supervision of Laurent Duret, working on substitution rate variability along the primate genomes. Julien joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in January 2010.

Felipe Simao - Masters Student

Felipe obtained his bachelor's degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana (PUCPR, Curitiba, Brazil) in 2010. He joined the group as a master student in January 2012 as part of his Masters' project in Bioinformatics.

Maria Warnefors - Postdoctoral Fellow

Maria received her MSc degree in Molecular Biology from Lund University in 2007, after spending her final year working on the regulatory evolution of a Drosophila Hox gene in the group of Claudio Alonso, University of Cambridge, UK. She then joined Adam Eyre-Walker's group at the University of Sussex, UK, to do a PhD on the evolution of human gene expression. Maria joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow in April 2011. Maria was awarded an EMBO longterm postdoctoral fellowship in 2011.