Anne-Florence Bitbol

Anne-Florence Bitbol is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL's Institute of Bioengineering, where she leads research at the intersection of statistical physics and biological evolution.

Education:

• PhD in Physics, Université Paris-Cité (2012)
• MSc in Fundamental Physics, École Normale Supérieure (2009)
• BSc in Physics, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2007)

Her group develops quantitative models to understand protein evolution, microbial adaptation, and sequence-function relationships. Current projects investigate how spatial structure impacts evolutionary dynamics and develop machine learning methods for protein sequence analysis.

Recipient of the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics (2023) and EPFL's Best Teacher Award (2023). Research combines theoretical approaches with data-driven methods to reveal fundamental principles in biological systems.

Recent publications include advances in protein language modeling, evolutionary rescue mechanisms, and CRISPR-Cas system dynamics. Teaches graduate courses in genomics and computational biology methods.