Christophe Dessimoz has been appointed Joint Executive Director of SIB as of 1 April 2022.
The recruitment committee selected his candidacy among a number of very good candidates, after two rounds of interviews with two external candidates and five outstanding internal candidates, and the Foundation Council just ratified this nomination today as proposed by the Board of Directors.
For those who do not know him already, Christophe is an internationally recognized scientist based at the DBC of the University of Lausanne as Associate Professor and SIB Group leader. He is as well an elected member of our Board of Directors since 2018.
An election among SIB Group Leaders will shortly take place to identify a successor for Christophe at this Board.
With expertise in comparative genomics and big data analysis, Christophe Dessimoz leads a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary research group, and has published over 100 scientific papers. His group develops the OMA database which relates genomes across the tree of life, and which is part of SIB’s resource portfolio since 2012. Among several distinctions, he was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) for his outstanding contributions (2019), and the Optimus Agora Prize of the SNSF for science communication (2021). Among several leadership roles, he is a board member of the ISCB, presides the Life Science Switzerland (LS2) Bioinformatics Intersection, and is a leader of the international Quest for Orthologs consortium. He obtained a Master’s degree in Biology in 2003, a PhD in Computer Science in 2009 at ETH Zurich and pursued a postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute near Cambridge (UK).
