Marcel Salathé

Marcel Salathé, born in 1975 in Basel, has established himself as a leading figure in digital epidemiology and artificial intelligence. After completing his PhD at ETH Zurich in biology and environmental sciences in 2007, he conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University before becoming an assistant professor at Penn State University's Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics in 2010. In 2015, he joined EPFL as an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences and the School of Life Sciences, where he founded the Digital Epidemiology Lab at Campus Biotech in Geneva. His contributions include founding the EPFL Extension School in 2016, launching AIcrowd.com, and organizing the Applied Machine Learning Days conference. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he served on the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Taskforce and led the development of the SwissCovid app. Currently, he serves as co-director of the EPFL AI Center and president of the steering committee of NRP 78 (COVID-19) of the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research combines epidemiology, artificial intelligence, and public health, with recent focus on nutritional epidemiology and AI-based tools for food tracking. He has been recognized as one of Switzerland's Digital Shapers multiple times and has published numerous influential papers in biological, medical, and computational fields.