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\r\nIn 2026, EPFL named Professor Konstantin Novoselov its first-ever EPFL Fellow, a newly created honorary title recognising scientific personalities of exceptional international stature.
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\r\nEPFL is delighted to host a public lecture to celebrate this nomination of one of the most influential physicists of our time.
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\r\nKonstantin Novoselov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 and is globally renowned for his pioneering work on graphene and two-dimensional materials. By isolating graphene for the first time, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, he opened an entirely new field of research, with profound implications for electronics, energy and quantum technologies.
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\r\nPicture this: it was from the graphite of an ordinary pencil lead that this \"super-material\" was first isolated. Using nothing more than a piece of adhesive tape to peel away a layer a single atom thick, Konstantin Novoselov revealed to the world a material with extraordinary properties. A million times thinner than a human hair, 200 times stronger than steel and remarkably conductive, graphene pushes every limit. From the lead of your pencil to the batteries of tomorrow, join us to discover how a deceptively simple gesture set off a genuine technological revolution.
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\r\nThis Campus Lecture offers an introduction to that revolution: how a two-dimensional material is transforming our understanding of matter and how today's fundamental discoveries become tomorrow's technologies.
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\r\nAbout Konstantin Novoselov
\r\nKonstantin Novoselov is a physicist specialising in condensed matter and nanotechnology. He conducted his Nobel Prize–winning research at the University of Manchester, where, together with Professor Andre Geim, he isolated graphene for the first time. He has held academic positions in the United Kingdom as well as internationally and is currently based at the National University of Singapore. Widely recognised as a leading figure in the study and application of two-dimensional materials, he has received numerous honours for his contributions to science.
Since 2006, the Erna Hamburger Prize is awarded by the EPFL-WISH Foundation (Women In Science and Humanities) and distinguishes influential, leading women scientists who are transforming their field and executing change.
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\r\nThe Erna Hamburger Prize 2026 will be awarded to Prof. Margo Seltzer. The award ceremony will be held on November 11th 2026 at 6:30 pm at SG 1138. On this occasion, the awardee will give a conference on the EPFL Campus. Don’t miss this exceptional opportunity to hear from one of the most influential figures in contemporary computer science.
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\r\nConference abstract
\r\nIt's 2026, and the answer to every problem today seems to be a multiple choice exercise of selecting answers from: AI, Agents, LLMs or machine learning. Is our future really just all about prompt engineering?
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\r\nAt a time when artificial intelligence, autonomous agents and large language models seem to be presented as the answer to every challenge, Margo Seltzer offers a thought-provoking perspective on the value of simplicity in computer science and machine learning. She will demonstrate how simpler and more transparent approaches can deliver performance comparable to that of the most sophisticated models, while providing greater interpretability, more efficient use of resources and a more natural way of addressing issues of fairness and privacy. The lecture will also explore a theme that lies at the heart of her career: collaboration. Drawing on her own experience of collaborative research, Margo Seltzer will explain how working together can broaden one’s impact, help overcome imposter syndrome, and enable individuals to discover and develop their unique strengths.
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\r\nAbout Prof. Margo Seltzer
\r\nProf. Margo Seltzer is Co-Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), where she moved after two decades as a Full Professor at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 from the University of California, Berkeley. A pioneering computer systems researcher, she is the recipient of numerous prestigious honors, including the 2023 ACM Athena Lecturer Award and the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Alongside her academic career, Margo Seltzer is an entrepreneur: she co-founded Sleepycat Software, maker of Berkeley DB, a widely used embedded database engine later acquired by Oracle. A recognized leader in her field, she is also a devoted mentor to young women in computer science and founded the \"Systers Lunch,\" the original diversity gathering at SOSP, the flagship conference of the systems research community.
This symposium, taking place on October 7, 2026 on the EPFL campus, aims to connect two rapidly advancing fields that too often remain separated: resilience to life stress (allostasis, plasticity and adaptation across body systems) and resilience to cognitive decline (cognitive reserve, brain maintenance and mechanisms relevant to dementia risk).
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\r\nThe program will combine a 1-day Scientific Symposium with internationally leading invited speakers alongside talks from the EPFL community.
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\r\nThe symposium will be followed by an early-evening roundtable intended to engage the broader campus community, including colleagues from the University of Lausanne and beyond – this roundtable will be part of the 2026 EPFL Jours Santé program.\r\n
The talk is jointly organized by the EPFL AI Center and the MLO Lab as part of the AI fundamentals seminar series.
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\r\nHosting Professor: Prof. Martin Jaggi
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\r\nTitle
\r\nSpeedrunning SWE-bench, or the $1,000 coding agent
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\r\nAbstract
\r\nSpeedrunning has become a popular engineering challenge in machine learning: achieve the best performance within a fixed compute budget. We use it as a scientific tool to study how models acquire specialized skills and how far those skills transfer. We speedrun SWE-bench by training coding agents from scratch on demonstrations from stronger models. With about $1,000 of training compute, we reach a 25% solve rate, outperforming GPT-4o. Compared to models with extensive pre-training, our speedrun models solve largely the same SWE-bench problems, and generalize about as well to new bugs and codebases. What, then, does pre-training buy for SWE-bench? Our experiments suggest a one-student hypothesis: pre-training helps a student imitate its teacher, but at matched imitation loss, pre-training choices barely matter. We stress-test this hypothesis by comparing a model trained on the web against a “vintage\" one trained only pre-1931 documents. Up to the SWE-bench scores we reach, pre-training is interchangeable with specialization data. We release nanoswe as an open project for studying specialization through speedrunning.
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\r\nBio
\r\nRicardo Olmedo is a final-year PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and a Google PhD Fellow. Advised by Moritz Hardt and Bernhard Schölkopf, he works on language model benchmarking and specialization. His research has earned three oral presentations at ICLR and NeurIPS. Most recently, he spent spring and summer 2026 visiting Sanmi Koyejo at Stanford University.
UNIL+EPFL Health Days 2026 invite you to dedicate some time to your physical and mental well-being from 28 September to 8 October. Over the course of these two weeks, a wide range of inspiring conferences, workshops and activities will take place at various times throughout the day. Some events will be open to the general public and offered in French and/or English.
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\r\nMembers of the university community will be able to take advantage of the health screenings and assessments available at the Health Village, hosted during the first week on the EPFL campus and during the second week on the University of Lausanne campus. They will also have access to information stands run by services and partners committed to promoting a comprehensive, 360-degree approach to health and well-being.
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\r\nThe programme will be available at the end of August on the dedicated website: https://jours-sante.ch/.
Thesis Director: Prof. J. McKinney,
\r\nBiotechnology and Bioengineering doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11625
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker
You can apply to participate and find all the relevant information (speakers, abstracts, program,...) on the event website: https://www.cecam.org/workshop-details/g-protein-coupled-receptors-functional-dynamics-revealed-by-experimental-and-computational-structural-data-1488.
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\r\nRegistration is required to attend the full event, take part in the social activities and present a poster at the poster session (if any). However, the EPFL community is welcome to attend specific lectures without registration if the topic is of interest to their research. Do not hesitate to contact the CECAM Event Manager if you have any question.
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\r\nDescription
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\r\nG protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent a vast and diverse class of transmembrane proteins that orchestrate a wide range of physiological processes by responding to both endogenous and exogenous ligands [1,2]. These receptors are essential to critical functions such as metabolism, immune regulation, neuronal signaling, and sensory perception - including vision and olfaction. Due to their physiological relevance and membrane accessibility, GPCRs are the targets of approximately 34% of all prescribed medications, accounting for nearly 27% of the global pharmaceutical market [3].
\r\nDespite their pharmaceutical importance, key aspects of GPCR function remain elusive. The canonical activation model posits that agonist binding to the extracellular orthosteric site triggers allosteric changes - most notably, the outward displacement of transmembrane helices 5 (TM5) and 6 (TM6) on the intracellular side - ultimately leading to receptor activation [2-4]. However, recent evidence suggests a more nuanced mechanism. In several GPCRs, activation appears to involve cooperative engagement between the agonist and the G protein. For example, the G protein may disrupt an \"inactivating ionic lock\" - a salt bridge between TM3 and TM6 - while the agonist stabilizes the active conformation. In some receptors, this is complemented by the formation of an “activating ionic lock” between TM5 and TM6 [5-8]. These dual contributions are considered thermodynamically essential for full activation [7].
\r\nAdding further complexity, GPCR activity is regulated by conformational microswitches and finely tuned intra-protein interaction networks. These dynamic rearrangements are difficult to capture and often elude direct correlation with functional outcomes. Moreover, allosteric ligands - which bind sites distinct from the orthosteric pocket - are being increasingly identified [9-12], along with small molecules capable of biased signaling, i.e., preferential activation of specific intracellular pathways [11-13, 16, 17]. These findings reveal a rich and underexplored conformational landscape that governs GPCR signaling. In addition, native membrane components—such as lipids and interacting proteins, including GPCR oligomers—are known to significantly modulate receptor function [11, 18-22].
\r\nTo disentangle these intricacies, computational modeling has become indispensable, offering atomistic insight into GPCR conformational dynamics and mechanistic understanding [1-2, 7, 11, 14, 16–21, 23]. Nevertheless, key questions remain - particularly regarding the structural basis of biased signaling, strategies for leveraging allosteric networks in pharmacology, and the modulatory role of the lipid environment. Addressing these gaps is crucial for both fundamental biology and the rational design of next-generation GPCR-targeting drugs with improved selectivity and safety profiles.
\r\nThese scientific challenges form the foundation of our upcoming workshop, which will focus on the latest experimental and computational approaches for studying the functional dynamics of GPCRs. Given the profound health, economic, and societal implications of modulating these receptors with precision, we aim to strengthen the interdisciplinary nature of the event by increasing the representation of experimental research and integrating cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications into the program.
\r\nBuilding upon the success of the 2022 and 2024 editions - which led to new collaborations and a landmark publication in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery [24] - our goal is to further enhance communication and collaboration between experimentalists and theoreticians. The workshop will serve as a reference point for young scientists and students, offering a platform to interact with leading international experts. We are confident that this initiative will foster insightful discussions and contribute meaningfully to advancing the field of GPCR pharmacology.
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\r\nReferences
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\r\n[1] J. Smith, R. Lefkowitz, S. Rajagopal, Nat. Rev. Drug. Discov., 17, 243-260 (2018)
\r\n[2] P. Conflitti, E. Lyman, M. Sansom, P. Hildebrand, H. Gutiérrez-de-Terán, P. Carloni, T. Ansell, S. Yuan, P. Barth, A. Robinson, C. Tate, D. Gloriam, S. Grzesiek, M. Eddy, S. Prosser, V. Limongelli, Nat. Rev. Drug. Discov., 24, 251-275 (2025)
\r\n[3] L. Picard, A. Orazietti, D. Tran, A. Tucs, S. Hagimoto, Z. Qi, S. Huang, K. Tsuda, A. Kitao, A. Sljoka, R. Prosser, Nat. Chem. Biol., 21, 71-79 (2024)
\r\n[4] B. Huang, C. St. Onge, H. Ma, Y. Zhang, Drug Discovery Today, 26, 189-199 (2021)
\r\n[5] D. Di Marino, P. Conflitti, S. Motta, V. Limongelli, Nat. Commun., 14, 6439 (2023)
\r\n[6] G. Milligan, R. Ward, S. Marsango, Current Opinion in Cell Biology, 57, 40-47 (2019)
\r\n[7] S. Huang, O. Almurad, R. Pejana, Z. Morrison, A. Pandey, L. Picard, M. Nitz, A. Sljoka, R. Prosser, eLife, 11, (2022)
\r\n[8] A. Duncan, W. Song, M. Sansom, Annu. Rev. Pharmacol. Toxicol., 60, 31-50 (2020)
\r\n[9] A. Morales-Pastor, T. Miljuš, M. Dieguez-Eceolaza, T. Stępniewski, V. Ledesma-Martin, F. Heydenreich, T. Flock, B. Plouffe, C. Le Gouill, J. Duchaine, D. Sykes, C. Nicholson, E. Koers, W. Guba, A. Rufer, U. Grether, M. Bouvier, D. Veprintsev, J. Selent, Nat. Commun., 16, 5265 (2025)
\r\n[10] A. Faouzi, H. Wang, S. Zaidi, J. DiBerto, T. Che, Q. Qu, M. Robertson, M. Madasu, A. El Daibani, B. Varga, T. Zhang, C. Ruiz, S. Liu, J. Xu, K. Appourchaux, S. Slocum, S. Eans, M. Cameron, R. Al-Hasani, Y. Pan, B. Roth, J. McLaughlin, G. Skiniotis, V. Katritch, B. Kobilka, S. Majumdar, Nature, 613, 767-774 (2022)
\r\n[11] M. Wall, E. Hill, R. Huckstepp, K. Barkan, G. Deganutti, M. Leuenberger, B. Preti, I. Winfield, S. Carvalho, A. Suchankova, H. Wei, D. Safitri, X. Huang, W. Imlach, C. La Mache, E. Dean, C. Hume, S. Hayward, J. Oliver, F. Zhao, D. Spanswick, C. Reynolds, M. Lochner, G. Ladds, B. Frenguelli, Nat. Commun., 13, 4150 (2022)
\r\n[12] D. Wootten, A. Christopoulos, M. Marti-Solano, M. Babu, P. Sexton, Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell. Biol., 19, 638-653 (2018)
\r\n[13] D. Hilger, M. Masureel, B. Kobilka, Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol., 25, 4-12 (2018)
\r\n[14] D. Aranda-García, T. Stepniewski, M. Torrens-Fontanals, A. García-Recio, M. Lopez-Balastegui, B. Medel-Lacruz, A. Morales-Pastor, A. Peralta-García, M. Dieguez-Eceolaza, D. Sotillo-Nuñez, T. Ding, M. Drabek, C. Jacquemard, J. Jakowiecki, W. Jespers, M. Jiménez-Rosés, V. Jun-Yu-Lim, A. Nicoli, U. Orzel, A. Shahraki, J. Tiemann, V. Ledesma-Martin, F. Nerín-Fonz, S. Suárez-Dou, O. Canal, G. Pándy-Szekeres, J. Mao, D. Gloriam, E. Kellenberger, D. Latek, R. Guixà-González, H. Gutiérrez-de-Terán, I. Tikhonova, P. Hildebrand, M. Filizola, M. Babu, A. Di Pizio, S. Filipek, P. Kolb, A. Cordomi, T. Giorgino, M. Marti-Solano, J. Selent, Nat. Commun., 16, 2020 (2025)
\r\n[15] D. Thal, A. Glukhova, P. Sexton, A. Christopoulos, Nature, 559, 45-53 (2018)
\r\n[16] L. Slosky, M. Caron, L. Barak, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, 42, 283-299 (2021)
\r\n[17] C. Zhu, X. Lan, Z. Wei, J. Yu, J. Zhang, Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B, 14, 67-86 (2024)
\r\n[18] V. D’Amore, P. Conflitti, L. Marinelli, V. Limongelli, Chem, 10, 3678-3698 (2024)
\r\n[19] A. Mafi, S. Kim, W. Goddard, Nat. Chem., 15, 1127-1137 (2023)
\r\n[20] H. Batebi, G. Pérez-Hernández, S. Rahman, B. Lan, A. Kamprad, M. Shi, D. Speck, J. Tiemann, R. Guixà-González, F. Reinhardt, P. Stadler, M. Papasergi-Scott, G. Skiniotis, P. Scheerer, B. Kobilka, J. Mathiesen, X. Liu, P. Hildebrand, Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol., 31, 1692-1701 (2024)
\r\n[21] A. Manglik, T. Kim, M. Masureel, C. Altenbach, Z. Yang, D. Hilger, M. Lerch, T. Kobilka, F. Thian, W. Hubbell, R. Prosser, B. Kobilka, Cell, 161, 1101-1111 (2015)
\r\n[22] M. Congreve, C. de Graaf, N. Swain, C. Tate, Cell, 181, 81-91 (2020)
\r\n[23] J. Lorente, A. Sokolov, G. Ferguson, H. Schiöth, A. Hauser, D. Gloriam, Nat. Rev. Drug. Discov., 24, 458-479 (2025)
\r\n[24] M. Lopez‐Balastegui, T. Stepniewski, M. Kogut‐Günthel, A. Di Pizio, M. Rosenkilde, J. Mao, J. Selent, British. J. Pharmacology., 182, 3211-3224 (2024)\r\n
Eine App programmieren? Ein Computerspiel erfinden? Eine Animation gestalten?
\r\nWenn dich eines dieser Dinge interessiert, bist du hier am richtigen Ort! Tausche und teile deine Ideen, lerne zu programmieren und entdecke Informatikberufe.
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\r\nDie Coding Club for Girls Workshops sind für Mädchen im Alter von 11 bis 15 Jahren und die Teilnahme ist kostenlos. Ab der Teilnahme an vier Workshops pro Jahr wird eine Teilnahmebestätigung ausgehändigt.
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\r\nOrt: Benedict Schule, Bern
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\r\nDatum und Zeit:
\r\n05. September 2026 : 09:30 bis 12:00 oder 13:30 bis 16:00 Uhr // Scratch-me
\r\n12. September 2026 : 09:30 bis 12:00 oder 13:30 bis 16:00 Uhr // Minitel
\r\n17. Oktober 2026 : 09:30 bis 12:00 oder 13:30 bis 16:00 Uhr // Snake-it
\r\n24. Oktober 2026 : 09:30 bis 12:00 oder 13:30 bis 16:00 Uhr // Webdesignerin
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\r\nDie Inhalte der Workshops sind untenstehend beschrieben.
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\r\nBedingungen\r\n