Charlotte Bunne

Charlotte Bunne is an Assistant Professor at EPFL, jointly appointed in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) and the School of Life Sciences (SV). She is a member of the EPFL AI Center and the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC), and is affiliated with the Precision Oncology Unit at the University Hospital in Geneva. She previously held postdoctoral positions at Genentech and Stanford, working with Aviv Regev and Jure Leskovec, after completing her PhD in Computer Science at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Andreas Krause and Marco Cuturi. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a visiting student at MIT. Her honors include the AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, a Fellowship of the German National Academic Foundation, and two ETH Zurich Medals.

AI2050 Project

Biology needs its own transformative leap in artificial intelligence: moving beyond static snapshots to systems that simulate, understand, and reason about living tissues. Bunne’s project introduces biological world models: computational frameworks that integrate multimodal data into structured, spatially and molecularly grounded representations of cellular and tissue organization. Equipped with generative simulators and intelligent reasoning agents in a closed feedback loop, these models forecast system dynamics, test hypotheses, and optimize therapeutic strategies. Validated through collaborations with experimental and clinical partners, this approach lays the foundation for simulation-based discovery and decision support, with initial applications in cancer treatment prediction.