Download Letter of support for Guillaume Chevereau Klosterneuburg, 11.2

Tobias Bollenbach
Assistant Professor
Letter of support for Guillaume Chevereau
Phone + 43 (0)2243 9000-4101
[email protected]
Bertalanffy Foundation Building
Am Campus 1
3400 Klosterneuburg
Austria
Klosterneuburg, 11.2.2014
Dear Selection Committee,
With this letter I would like to fully endorse Guillaume Chevereau’s application for the “Teaching Through
Research” workshop in Paris. Guillaume would bring the unique interdisciplinary perspective of a
physicist who recently gained substantial experience with teaching interdisciplinary courses to PhD
students with diverse backgrounds to this event. I support his application with great enthusiasm.
Guillaume had a very impressive career trajectory so far: he studied physics and got a PhD at ENS Lyon.
He has considerable international experience from several stays abroad, again at excellent universities
(Boston University, USA and Uppsala University, Sweden). Importantly, he successfully completed an
outstanding PhD working with Alain Arneodo and Cedric Vaillant at ENS Lyon. His work dealt with
nucleosome positioning on chromatin using a highly interesting statistical physics approach. He mostly
worked theoretically in this project, but very closely collaborated with experimentalists. This work
resulted in several first- and co-author papers in some of the top journals in this field (Physical Review
Letters, PNAS, and Genome Research). In brief, Guillaume has an excellent track record for a theoretical
physicist doing interdisciplinary work between physics and biology. He has a deep understanding of
physics and biology and excitement about his work, going far beyond what is typical for researchers at
this career stage.
When he joined my lab, Guillaume got excited about doing experimental work in bacterial systems
biology himself and, in particular, in using bacterial genetics to reveal the underlying causes of drug
interactions. He started working on a cross-disciplinary research project that involves bacterial genetics
and other microbiology techniques, automated high throughput growth rate measurements of bacterial
cultures, and statistical data analysis and theoretical modeling approaches inspired by physics. In his
project, Guillaume specifically aims to reveal the mechanisms that underlie drug interactions between
antibiotic pairs, an important biological problem with potential long-term relevance for public health. His
research project uses modern lab automation technology and makes extensive use of new tools for
systematic genome-wide genetic perturbations. Guillaume has already obtained some very interesting
results some of which go far beyond the original aims of this project. These will almost certainly lead to
two publications in visible interdisciplinary journals with Guillaume as first author.
After joining IST Austria in September 2011, Guillaume had a great impact on the teaching in our
graduate school. Specifically, he volunteered twice to be the teaching assistant for a biological physics
course I offer together with Gasper Tkacik. This is a full semester course with two lectures per week, a
final exam, and bi-weekly homework assignments and recitations (in which the homework is discussed).
Guillaume independently designed most of the homework assignments, independently ran the
recitations which were his responsibility, contributed to the contents of the lectures which I often
discussed with him and he also had a major impact on the problems in the final exam. He showed great
independence in teaching and remarkable enthusiasm during this course. Not surprisingly, he was very
popular among the students who gave excellent feedback on his performance as a lecturer in the
recitations. Graduate students at IST have diverse backgrounds ranging from biology over physics to
mathematics and computer science, making the teaching of courses such as the biological physics course
which are attended by students from all these fields particularly challenging. Guillaume has mastered this
challenge. Since the homework for this course involved a considerable amount of programming,
Guillaume noticed that many of the students have a need for a practical hands-on introductory
programming course. On his own initiative he thus came up with the idea to offer such a course which he
is currently teaching. This is an intense two week course focusing on specific implementations in Matlab.
Importantly, this course is run entirely independently by Guillaume – a remarkable achievement which
very few, if any, of the other postdocs at our institute can match.
Guillaume has also helped and taught many others here at a more informal level. Specifically, he greatly
helped students and even other postdocs in my group as well as several interns and rotation students
who went through the group over the last two years. Among other things Guillaume taught them how to
program a customized robotic system we are using in our experimental work, how to analyze and best
represent experimental data using Matlab, how to numerically solve mathematical models and analyze
them using the framework of dynamical systems theory etc. On his own initiative Guillaume gave several
highly valuable pedagogical talks in our group meeting, e.g. explaining how to exploit the full potential of
our group Wiki (an online platform we have introduced to make information sharing among group
members as easy as possible and to conserve relevant long-term information). He further taught others
in my group about good practices for storing data, staying organized, and making sure that everything
important is backed up on a server. Overall, Guillaume has proven to be an excellent teacher during his
time here with a remarkable enthusiasm and passion, and did an invaluable service to many of the
graduate students and other researchers at our institute.
Beyond his strong teaching skills and academic background, Guillaume will be a pleasure to have at the
workshop: he is very friendly, energetic, honest, humorous, and greatly enjoys communicating with other
people about science and education. In summary, I strongly support Guillaume Chevereau’s application
for the “Teaching Through Research” workshop in Paris. He is an excellent, highly talented teacher and
researcher with a strong theoretical background, great communication skills and enthusiasm, and is truly
passionate about teaching.
Sincerely,
Tobias Bollenbach