When Machine Learning Serves Medicine: Meet Johann Faouzi 

Johann Faouzi joined ENSAI in the fall as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and researcher at CREST. His research activity focuses on machine learning for time series analysis and for medical applications. 

Johann Faouzi teaches the “Introduction to object-oriented programming and code documentation” and “Data preprocessing project” courses.

Machine Learning at the service of neuroscience

A graduate of the engineering program at ENSAE Paris, Johann Faouzi seized the occasion to work on a meaningful research area by pursuing a PhD related to machine learning and medicine. He joined Paris Brain Institute as a PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow. The Paris Brain Institute is an international brain and spinal cord research lab bringing patients, doctors and researchers together with the aim of rapidly developing treatments for nervous system disorders.

“My PhD thesis focused on machine learning to predict impulse control disorders in Parkinson’s disease. During my postdoctoral position, I led investigations on the genetics of cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease.”

Johann Faouzi was a member of both the Aramis project team (computer science side) and the “Molecular pathophysiology of Parkinson’s disease” team (clinical side). His advisors were Olivier Colliot, a senior research scientist at CNRS, and Jean-Christophe Corvol, a neurologist.

During that time, he also worked on machine learning for time series and taught Python programming classes at Sorbonne University and Deep Learning for medical imaging classes for the Master MVA.

Researching

Johann Faouzi’s main research areas are machine learning for time series analysis and for medical applications. Besides programming, especially in Python, he is interested in open science, in particular open-source software. He has been involved in developing and maintaining two Python packages for time series analysis with machine learning, which proved to be a rewarding learning experience.

“I am looking into bridging the gap between programming and machine learning, in particular with applications in neuroscience”.

Welcome to ENSAI!

Career milestones

2018-2020: PhD in computer science at Paris Brain Institute
2021-2022: Postdoctoral research fellow at Paris Brain Institute
2022-now: Assistant professor in computer science and machine learning at ENSAI

Find out more about Johann Faouzi and research at ENSAI