Laurène Donati

Biography

Dr Laurène Donati is in charge of EPFL's strategy for societal impact since February 2025. She was the co-founder and Executive Director of the EPFL Center for Imaging since 2021. Prior to this, she was the Lead Coordinator of the Imaging@EPFL initiative launched by the EPFL Presidency in 2019. She holds a Master in bio-engineering and a PhD in electrical engineering from EPFL (2016 and 2020, respectively). Her work focused on the development of new reconstruction methods for cryo-electron microscopy, including novel unsupervised learning-based techniques for single-particle analysis. She was a visiting researcher in the Heffner Biomedical Imaging Lab at Columbia University in New York City, USA, from mid-2014 to mid-2015. She received the 2014 WISH Community Career Investment Award from the EPFL Foundation for Women in Sciences and Humanity “for demonstrating academic and professional excellence”. She was an elected member of the Parliament of Valais (CH) from 2013 to 2017.