Gisou van der Goot is the Head of the Laboratory of Cell and Membrane Biology, and founding member of the Global Health Institute (GHI), School of Life Sciences, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne/EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne).
From 2021 to 2024, She was Vice President for Responsible Transformation.
From 2014 to 2020, she was Dean of the School of Life Sciences.
Before joining EPFL, she was Group Leader at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and subsequently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the same university.
She studied engineering at the Ecole Centrale de Paris, then did a PhD in Molecular Biophysics at the Nuclear Energy Research Center, Saclay, France, followed by a postdoc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.
She obtained an EMBO Young Investigator award in 2001, a Howard Hughes International Scholar award in 2005, the Swiss Prix Marcel Benoist in 2009, the same year she was elected EMBO member (European Molecular Biology Organisation), in 2020 she received the Suffrage Science award in Life Sciences .
She is a leader in the fields of molecular and cellular understanding of bacterial toxins, the organization of mammalian membranes and in organelles biology.
Professor van der Goot is, and has been, member of diverse scientific boards such as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), the Conseil suisse de la science et de la technologie (CSST) , the European Research Council (ERC) and the Max Planck Society. She is member of the Scientific board of the Fondation Louis Jeantet de Médecine, and the Foundation Bettencourt.

2025:          IMD (International Institute for Management Development), Lausanne, Switzerland
 “High Performance Board Program”

2017:          IMD “High Performance Leadership Program”