Aurélien Macé studied mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence and computational biology. In 2007, he obtained a double master’s degree from the Ecole Centrale Nantes (France) and KTH (Sweden). He did his master thesis within the Blue Brain Project at EPFL on neuron electrophysiological classification.

He then left research and went to work for a small company on the development and installation of a smart camera able to detect smoke and fire. After two years in the industry, he decided to move back to his first interest in computational biology and did a one-year project at Merck Serono within the biomarker discovery department. He developed a tool for automatic gene-signature detection on gene expression microarray.

In 2011, Aurélien had the opportunity to go to the US where he worked 6 months as an engineer in the Blood Brain Barrier Group at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Back in Switzerland, he worked towards his PhD, which he earned in 2017 under the supervision of Zoltan Kutalik and Alexandre Reymond. His project dealt with copy number variation detection and association. He worked first on the improvement of copy number variants (CNVs) quality assessment. Aurélien then ran, in collaboration with several research groups, a genome-wide CNVs association meta-analysis on anthropometric traits in ~200,000 adults.