Jean‐Philippe Thiran

Timeline

1. 1993–1997

   Electrical engineering at Louvain

   Born in Namur, Belgium, in 1970, he earns an electrical engineering degree in 1993 and a PhD in 1997 at the Université catholique de Louvain. Benoît Macq supervises his thesis.

2. 1998–2011

   Building the LTS5 group

   He joins the Signal Processing Institute of EPFL in Lausanne as a senior lecturer in February 1998. From 2004 to 2011, he is a tenure-track assistant professor in charge of the image analysis group LTS5, and he builds a team of some 20 researchers.

3. March 2011–June 2020

   Associate to full professor

   EPFL promotes him to associate professor in March 2011, and he becomes a full professor in June 2020. He also holds a 20% associate professor position in the Department of Radiology of the University Hospital Center and University of Lausanne (CHUV-UNIL).

4. 2016

   A teaching prize at EPFL

   He wins the 2016 teaching prize for the Electrical and Electronic Engineering section at EPFL, where he has taught since 1998. He develops three courses in signal and image processing, from Bachelor's to PhD level, and directs both LTS5 and the section.

5. 2017

   The tractography challenge

   In 2017, he is one of the authors of a Nature Communications paper on an international tractography challenge for mapping brain connectivity from diffusion MRI, and eight LTS5 members are among the authors. The challenge draws 96 submissions from 20 research groups; most algorithms recover 90% of the ground-truth bundles, and the tractograms also contain many more invalid than valid bundles.

6. 2017

   Computer vision for street litter

   In 2017, he is a co-author of “A Computer Vision System to Localize and Classify Wastes on the Streets”, a study by EPFL's LTS5, the startup Cortexia, the Haute Ecole Arc and several Swiss cities. Cameras on street sweepers or bicycles record the streets, and a machine-learning system sorts what it sees into 25 categories of waste, giving cities data for planning street cleaning.

7. 2022

   Microstructure imaging with machine learning

   In March 2022, he gives an EPFL seminar on microstructure imaging by diffusion MRI, which combines hyper-realistic synthetic tissue models, Monte-Carlo simulations and machine-learning estimation to study brain tissue. A Fellow of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), he also directs EPFL's Institute of Electrical and Micro Engineering.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and head of LTS5

   He is a full professor at EPFL and leads the Signal Processing Laboratory 5, whose work spans computer vision, diffusion-MRI microstructure imaging and ultrasound imaging. He heads the CIBM Signal Processing CHUV-EPFL Computational Medical Imaging Section, which he has belonged to since its creation in 2004, and holds a 20% associate professor position in Radiology at UNIL-CHUV.