Group Members

Prof. Olivier Michielin obtained a diploma of Physics in 1991 at the EPFL and an MD from the University of Lausanne in 1997. He pursued his PhD training under the supervision of Jean-Charles Cerottini (LICR) and Martin Karplus (Harvard and Strasbourg Universities). He was appointed Group Leader of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in 2002 and became an Assistant Professor and Privat Docent at the Medical Faculty of Lausanne in 2004 and 2005, respectively. In parallel, he has trained as a medical oncologist and obtained his board certification in 2007 at the Multidisciplinary Oncology Center (CePO) of Lausanne where he is currently in charge of the melanoma clinic. He became Associate Professor of Translational Oncology at the Medical Faculty of Lausanne in 2010 and Medecin Chef, Head of Personalized Analytical Oncology, Department of Oncology, CHUV, in 2016. He was promoted Full Professor, Chair of Precision Oncology Center, Department of Oncology, CHUV in 2019. Prof. Olivier Michielin is mainly focused on translational oncology, developing new molecularly defined therapeutic approaches based on original in silico techniques developed in his laboratory. As head of Personalized Analytical Oncology, his aim is also to make use of all available -omics data to guide treatment decisions for all oncology patients, and develop baseline and on treatment predictive biomarkers in order to determine the optimal treatment sequences. Contact

Vincent Zoete obtained an engineer degree in chemistry from the ENSCL (Lille, France) in 1995, together with a DEA in Organic and Macromolecular chemistry. He started a PhD in organic chemistry in 1995 in the Laboratoire de Chimie Organique et Macromoleculaire of the university of Lille I. In the meantime, he obtained a Masters degree in Drug Design in 1996 in Lille. After a one-year interruption in 1997/1998 where he became a Navy Officer at the Headquarter of the French Navy in Paris, he finished his PhD in 1999. Afterwards, he moved to Strasbourg and started a Postdoc in Molecular Modelling in Martin Karplus group. At the same time, he also worked for Enanta Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA, USA). In 2003/2004, he continued his Postdoc both in Markus Meuwly group in Basel and Martin Karplus group in Strasbourg. In 2004, he joined the SIB as a Responsable de Recherche in the Molecular Modelling group, and became Associate Group Leader in 2011. He was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Oncology UNIL-CHUV, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, in 2017. He became SIB group leader the same year. Vincent Zoete develops methods in protein engineering and computer-aided drug design, and apply them in in-house projects, or in collaboration with academic or industrial partners. Contact

Marine Bugnon obtained her Bsc. in biology in 2020 and her Msc. in molecular life sciences with a specialization in bioinformatics in 2022 at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). During her Msc. she joined the Molecular Modeling Group of the Swiss Institute Bioinformatics (SIB) to work on a fast and automated approach to model T-cell receptors from sequence. After her Msc graduation, she started her PhD at the SIB. She is working on the development of molecular modeling tools to study molecular interactions. She developed the novel interface of SwissParam and SwissDock, two projects part of the SwissDrugDesign suit. She is working on a collective project whose aim is to help develop models for protein-ligand interactions. In her spare time, she likes to kill orcs in her role-playing games and bake delicious pastries. Contact

Michel A. Cuendet has a Master's degree in Astrophysics from EPFL and a second Master's degree in Applied Mathematics focusing on machine learning, statistics, and high-performance computing from Ecole Polytechnique. In 2002, he was granted a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship to pursue a doctoral thesis ETH Zurich focusing on non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. In 2007 he joined the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) to work on T-cell receptor function and the development of peptide inhibitors of protein-protein interactions. In 2010, a second Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship allowed him to joint New York University for a postdoctoral stay on advanced MD methodology. In 2013 M. A. Cuendet joined Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) as an Instructor in Computational Biomedicine, where he focused on protein allostery and the mechanism of membrane transporters, while continuing his work on T-cell receptor function. Since the fall of 2017 M. A. Cuendet holds joint appointments as a Group Leader in the Service of Personalized Analytical Oncology of the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), a Senior Scientist at the SIB, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at WCM. Contact

Antoine Daina holds a Federal Diploma of Pharmacist and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Geneva. He spent three years as a computational chemist at Syngenta Crop Protection, in the Chemistry Research Department and three years at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Geneva as Senior Scientist and Lecturer. Antoine joined the Molecular Modeling Group at SIB, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in 2012 and is in charge of developing and providing novel methods for computer-aided drug design, which are applied to academic and industrial drug discovery. His main research themes include chemoinformatics and machine-learning models for physicochemistry, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, virtual screening and ADME. He teaches drug design to Master and Doctoral students and is involved in the development of educational tools targeting high-schools and the general public. Contact

Mathilde Goullieux accomplished two years of preparatory classes, specialized in physics and chemistry, between 2014 and 2016, before entering the European School of Chemistry, Polymers and Materials (ECPM) in Strasbourg (France). In 2019, she obtained an engineer degree in chemistry from the ECPM, together with a master degree in macromolecular and supramolecular chemistry. During her formation, she achieved an internship in Lund University (Sweden) in quantum chemistry. The project was about studying metal organic frameworks bending potential, using density functional theory and multi-configurational approach. After that, she completed her master project in 2019 in AstraZeneca R&D in Gothenburg (Sweden), where she worked on the development of a course-grained model of mRNA-delivering lipid nanoparticles. She started her PhD at the SIB right after her graduation, and she is working on the development of an interface between the multi-scale modeling framework MiMiC and the docking code Attracting Cavities. This project aims at performing QM/MM docking of covalent and non-covalent ligands. Contact

Justyna Iwaszkiewicz studied biotechnology at the Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology of University of Gdansk and Medical University of Gdansk in Poland. During her PhD at the Chemistry Department of University of Gdansk she was studying oligomerization of cystatin C with molecular modeling techniques. At the Molecular Modeling group she works as research scientist involved in the projects of Protein Modeling Facility of University of Lausanne, a competence center for structural bioinformatics. Using the computational biology techniques like homology modeling, molecular dynamics simulations or docking she is trying to help the researchers with interpretation and planning of biological experiments. She is working in close collaboration with many different groups of University of Lausanne, CHUV and EPFL. Justyna is really good at collecting yarn and patterns and never using them for crocheting. Contact