Bart Deplancke's Biography

Bart Deplancke, Head, Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne

Bart Deplancke obtained his Master’s degree in Biochemical Engineering from Ghent University in 1998. He then went on to do a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specializing in Immunobiology. During his PhD and given his engineering background, Bart became increasingly interested in a more global or systems-driven approach to solve complex biological questions. He therefore teamed up in 2007 for his postdoctoral studies with Dr. Marian Walhout, initially at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. Marc Vidal, and then at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to generate novel approaches enabling the study of the principles that control differential gene expression at a systems level in C. elegans. At the end of 2007, he assumed a position as Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) where he currently leads the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics (LSBG). The LSBG is using microfluidics, high-throughput sequencing, large-scale yeast screens, and computational approaches to characterize the regulatory code in Drosophila and mammals and to examine how variations in this code affect molecular and organismal diversity.