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
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.
Emily Möller. Emily recently completed her Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences Engineering at EPFL and will begin her Master's in Biotechnology at ETH Zürich. As a summer intern in our lab, she is investigating the metabolic capabilities of soil-associated bacterial isolates, generating data to support models that predict microbial interactions and community assembly.
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.
Sandra Valero. Sandra is a technician focused on supporting the group's work in the wetlab. She received her Master's in Biochemistry from the University of Geneva and her Bachelor's in Biotechnology from the University of Almería in Spain.
National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) Microbiomes
Vorholt Lab, ETH Zurich
Stocker Lab, ETH Zurich
Hatzimanikatis Lab, EPFL
Segrè Lab, Boston University