Nicolas has been developing and optimizing computer algorithms since 1979. He studied plant biology and biochemistry at the University of Lausanne. In the early nineties, during the course of his PhD, he pioneered the use of molecular biology in the Institute of Plant Biology, isolated and sequenced two genes of the glyoxylate cycle, built a molecular model for one of them and initiated the development of Swiss-PdbViewer. He obtained his PhD in 1995 and joined the group of Manuel Peitsch at GlaxoWellcome, where he contributed to the development of Swiss-Model. From 1996-2002, he also taught postgraduate Structural Biology courses at the University of Geneva, EPFL and for the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

During his 12 years at GlaxoSmithKline, he held positions of increasing responsibilities, led a group specialized in Evolutionary and Structural Bioinformatics and contributed to several drug discovery research programs.

In 2008, Nicolas joined the SIB Vital-IT group, headed by Ioannis Xenarios, where he used his bioinformatics and biology expertise to support a wide range of research projects and developed specialized software to support projects that required high performance computing.

In June 2019 he has been recruited to head the newly created Bioinformatics Competence Center of the University of Lausanne.

Christian obtained a CFC (professional certificate) in agriculture followed by a Master degree in computer engineering from EPFL and Carnegie Mellon University. He then gained a Ph.D. from EPFL with focus on a high performance reconfigurable processor, using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and its software development environment. He started his professional career with activities in both academia (Systems Manager at ISREC) and industry (software developer at Xemics SA). In 1998, he joined the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) as Systems Manager at the Office of Information Technology, headed by Victor Jongeneel, and subsequently as Assistant Investigator in the Computational Genomics group, also headed by Victor, and finally, as project manager for the Melanoma sequencing project at the LICR.

In 2011, Christian joined the Vital-IT Group, headed by Ioannis Xenarios, as Senior Scientist, where he used his bioinformatics and computer/software engineering expertise to support a wide range of research projects. He also developed specialized software to enable projects requiring high performance computing.

In June 2019, he was recruited to co-head, together with Nicolas Guex, the newly created Bioinformatics Competence Centre of the University of Lausanne.

Technical expertise
Network administration, Relational databases, Software packaging, Storage administration, Systems administration
Analytical expertise
Genomics, Sequence analysis, Transcriptomics analysis
Biological expertise
Canceromics, Clinical bioinformatics