User:Micha
Researcher
- email: micha.hersch at unil.ch
- personal web page: http://wwwpeople.unil.ch/micha.hersch/
Research
I am involved in the Plant Growth project from SystemsX.ch. I am mainly interested in understanding, through a combination of mathematical modeling and experiments, how biological systems can robustly self-regulate their behavior. I studied this in the context of the gene regulatory network of the shade avoidance mechanism in the model plant Arabidopsis Thaliana and in the context of robust gradient formation for cell size determination in the fission yeast.
I developed HypoPhen, an image analysis software for the semi-automatic phenotyping of Arabidopsis seedlings and Cellophane, an ImageJ plugin for the semi-automatic extraction of flourescent-tagged protein profiles along the cell membrane.
I also did some genome-wide data analysis related to human genetics, for example Genome Wide Association Studies, and another one showing the higher resilience of females to mutations in genes involved in neuro-developmental disorders such as autism.
My scientific interests include dynamical systems theory, self-organization, statistical learning theory and large-scale biological data analysis. For additional information, you can consult my web page.
I did my ph.D at the lasa (EPFL), where I worked on bio-inspired motor control and artificial cognition for humanoid robots. See this page for more details on this.
And before this, I worked on automatic speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
Academic titles
- 2009: Phd in cognitive robotics, LASA, EPFL
- 2004: Master in cognitive science, Université Paris VI
- 2003: Master in computer science, EPFL
Publications
Look here
Teaching and outreach
- I am coordinating the UNIL BSc course: "Solving Biological Problems that require Math"
- I also visit schools and tell them about medical genetics as part of the gene days
