Prof. Christophe Dessimoz

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Associate Professor, University of Lausanne
Executive Director, Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics

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Biography

Christophe Dessimoz is Associate Professor at the Department of Computational Biology, and Executive Director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

Christophe studied biology at ETH Zurich and obtained his PhD in computer science (2009) from the same institution. After a postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge (UK), he joined University College London as lecturer (2013), then reader (2015), then professor (2020). In 2015, he moved his main activities to the University of Lausanne, first as SNSF professor (2015), then as associate professor (2021). Since 2016, Christophe is also a group leader at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. In 2022, he became executive director of SIB.

Christophe has published over 100 scientific articles, and has received several awards, including the 2012 SIB Early Career Bioinformatician Award, the 2019 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology, and the 2021 Optimus Agora Prize from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

An interview is available here (English). A biography is provided in this article (English) and in this university profile (French). There is another interview here (French) here.

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Distinctions

• Optimus Agora Award, 2021
• ISCB Overton Prize, 2019
• EMBO Young Investigator, 2016
• SIB Young Bioinformatician Award, 2012

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Academic leadership and service

Current

• Editor for PeerJ and BMC Evolutionary Biology
• Frequent peer reviewer for numerous journals and grant agencies
• Board of Directors member of the International Society for Computational Biology (since 2021)
• Member of the SPHN National Steering Board
• Scientific Advisory Board member of the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium
• Steering committee member of the Quest for Orthologs consortium
• Steering committee member of the ISCB Evolution and Comparative Genomics COSI

 

Previous

• Member of the Foundation Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (2023)
• Group Leader representative at the Board of Directors of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (2018-2022)
• Head of the UNIL Doctoral Program in Quantitative Biology (2018-2022)
• President of the Life Science Switzerland (LS2) Bioinformatics "Intersection"
• Conference organisation and programme committees (selected):
  • ISMB 2022, Proceedings co-chair
  • ISMB/ECCB 2021, Proceedings co-chair
  • ISMB/ECCB 2019, Area co-chair (Population Genomics and Molecular Evolution), EvolCompGen COSI co-chair
  • ISMB 2018, COSI Proceedings Chair (Evolution)
  • ISMB/ECCB 2015, Area co-chair (Applied Bioinformatics)
  • PC member of ECCB 2012, ISMB AFP 2013, BC[2] 2015, AlCoB 2015, ISMB/ECCB 2015, ECCB 2016, ISMB AFP 2017, GenoPri’18
  • Co-organizer of Quest for Orthologs 2 (Hinxton, 2011), 4 (Barcelona, 2015), 5 (Los Angeles, 2017), and 6 (Nagoya, 2019)
  • Co-organizer of GNOME 2014
• Co-chair of the EMBL-EBI postdoc association (2012-2013)
• Co-founder of Young European Biotech Network (2001)

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Consulting

• Expert witness for patent litigation, with cases in UK, US, and France.

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Media coverage

Selected interviews and quotes are listed here.