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Laboratory for Computational
Biology and Bioinformatics
 
Welcome to the website of the Laboratory for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
The Laboratory was started in June 2006 by Professor Bernard Moret. Our main area of interest is the design of models and algorithms for problems arising in biology, mostly evolutionary biology (phylogenetics) and genomics (regulatory, comparative, and evolutionary genomics). We work mainly with large-scale simulations, but we also make use of published data, including most common databases in genomics and proteomics.

Objective

To design, implement, test, and assess models and algorithms for discrete problems arising in evolutionary molecular biology.

See the recent ACM Ubiquity interview with Prof. Moret on Experimental Algorithmics.

Latest Events

• April 23: Yann Christinat successfully defended his PhD thesis today, in the presence of committee members Jean-Yves Le Boudec (EPFL, jury president), Paola Bonizzoni (U. Di Milano), Philipp Bücher (EPFL), and Marc Robinson-Rechavi (U. Lausanne). Congratulations Yann!!!
• April 19: Vaibhav Rajan successfully defended his PhD thesis today, in the presence of committee members Arjen Lenstra (EPFL, jury president), Mona Singh (Princeton U.), Emre Telatar (EPFL), and Tandy Warnow (U. Texas). Congratulations Vaibhav!!!
• November 14 Congratulations to Yann Christinat, who won the Best Student Paper award at the 5th IEEE Conf. on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine BIBM'11.
• November 13-15 Yann Christinat and Bernard Moret travelled to Atlanta to attend the 5th IEEE Conf. on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine BIBM'11; Yann Christinat presented a paper and Bernard Moret gave an invited address.
• November Xiuwei Zhang travelled to MIT (and the Broad Institute), Princeton (and the Lewis-Sigler Institute), and the US NIH, where she gave invited talks; she also attended the Cold Spring Harbor workshop on Genome Informatics.
• October Xiuwei Zhang and Vaibhav Rajan travelled to Barcelona to attend some of the workshops in the RECOMB combined satellite meetings RECOMB-SB/RECOMB-RG/RECOMB-RICCI/DREAM
• October Xiuwei Zhang and Bernard Moret visited Cambridge U. to initiate a collaboration with Prof. Sarah Teichmann; Bernard Moret gave an invited talk at the MRC.
• September Jonas Helfer has been awarded a Fulbright Foreign Student fellowship, which will fully fund his initial year of PhD studies in the US.
• September 15 Jonas Helfer successfully defended his MS thesis today, presenting it from Beijing -- he worked with Prof. Rui Jiang at Tsinghua University.
• August 15 Avinash Das Sahu successfully defended his MS thesis today, presenting it from India -- he worked with Prof. William Noble at the U. of Washington. Avinash will start working on his PhD in Computer Science at the U. of Maryland in Fall 2011.
• August Prof. Jijun Tang, from the U. of South Carolina, has joined our lab for the first half of his sabbatical. He will stay with us until the end of the year, working with everyone in the lab on phylogenetic reconstruction, rearrangements, and related topics.
• July 25: Xiuwei Zhang successfully defended her PhD thesis today, in the presence of committee members Emre Telatar (EPFL, jury president), Manolis Kellis (MIT), Sarah Teichmann (Cambridge U.), and Matthias Seeger (EPFL). Congratulations Xiuwei!!!
  Xiuwei will stay this next year with our lab as a postdoctoral fellow.
• Nishanth Nair has been offered a fellowship for the fall program Mathematical and Computational Approaches in High-Throughput Genomics at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, from mid-September to mid-December 2011.
• July Bernard Moret travelled to Vienna to give an invited lecture at the 3rd RECOMB Conf. on Bioinformatics Education RECOMB-BE'11.
• Two international MS students joined us this summer under the Summer@EPFL program: Ms. Anastasiya Migunova and Mr. Vladislav Semipiatnyi, both from Moscow State U. (Russia).
• May Yu Lin, Bernard Moret, Vaibhav Rajan, and Xiuwei Zhang travelled to Changsha (China) to give a keynote address and present papers at the 7th Int'l Symp. on Bioinformatics Research & Appls. ISBRA'11.
• March Bernard Moret travelled to Raleigh-Durham to participate in a meeting on "Challenges with large-scale phylogeny estimation" at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center NESCENT.
• Olga Ponomarova, who was a summer intern in our lab in 2010, was admitted to the PhD program of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Congratulations to Olga!

Courses

We regularly teach the Master's level courses Computational Molecular Biology (Spring semesters, 5 EPFL credits) and Advanced Algorithms (Fall semesters, 7 EPFL credits). We occasionally teach the PhD level course Theory of Computation (5 EPFL credits). We have co-taught (with colleagues from the School of Life Sciences) courses in Bioinformatics at both Master's and PhD level. We will teach the second-year course Theoretical Computer Science in Spring 2012.

About EPFL

EPFL is consistently ranked first (with Cambridge U.) in Europe and among the world's top 20 in Engineering and Computer Science; see, for instance, the Times Higher Education, the Leiden Ranking, the Shanghai Jiaotong Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the QS World University Ranking. (Note that most rankings of Computer Science departments are unusable, as they rely on ISI Web of Science, which is heavily biased towards journals, whereas most high-value outlets in Computer Science are conference proceedings.)