Dr. Alan Pacheco joined the Department of Fundamental Microbiology at the University of Lausanne as a tenure-track assistant professor and Branco Weiss Fellow in September 2025. Alan carried out his postdoctoral research as a Branco Weiss and JSMF Postdoctoral Fellow in the group of Julia Vorholt at ETH Zurich, where he combined synthetic community experiments with computational modeling to understand metabolic interactions among leaf-associated bacteria in Arabidopsis thaliana. He completed his Ph.D. in bioinformatics in the group of Daniel Segrè at Boston University, where he developed principles for engineering synthetic microbial communities via metabolic interactions.
More information can be found here: Full CV; Publication list
Samuel Bischof. Samuel is master student working on the impact of metabolic interdependencies in microbial communities through a consumer-resource modeling framework. He completed his Bachelor's at UNIL and continued with a Master's in Molecular Life Sciences.
Rose Evard. Rose is a Ph.D. student examining bacterial interactions through environmental modulation. She completed her MSc studies at UNIL in Molecular Life Sciences, and she received her Bachelors in Biology and Data Science from Smith College.
Sudharshan Ravi. Dr. Sudharshan Ravi is a postdoctoral researcher focused on computational modeling of metabolic interactions. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical and Bioengineering from ETH Zurich, developing algorithms to predict metabolic flux changes from omics data in aging and neurodegeneration. He later worked at the University of Zurich, studying how socioeconomic gradients influence gene expression and phenotypic outcomes. Before returning to academia, he served as Bioinformatics Lead at a precision sports medicine startup, using machine learning for biomarker discovery and injury prediction in professional athletes.
Jacob Riina. Jacob is a Ph.D. student working on the empirically-guided modeling of microbial consortia and their metabolic interactions. He received his Master's from the Universität Bern in bioinformatics and computational biology, Bachelor's from The Ohio State University in molecular genetics, and has previously worked in the biotech industry.
Valentina Saldarriaga Ortiz. Valentina is a technician supporting the group’s research activities in the wet lab. She obtained her CFC diploma as a biology laboratory technician from ESSanté in Lausanne.
Jérôme Smyrliadis. Jérôme completed his Bachelor's degree at UNIL and is now a Master’s student in Behaviour Evolution and Conservation with a specialisation in computational ecology and evolution. His project compares the ability of genome-scale metabolic models to predict the growth of environmental bacteria on different media.
Emily Möller, research intern 2026, now MSc student at ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Sandra Valero, laboratory technician 2026, now at Cajamar Innova, Spain