Speaker Biographies

Prof. Dr. Mohamed Abouelhoda is the Chairman of Computational Sciences Department, Center for Genomic Medicine, King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC), and Professor of bioinformatics and biomedical engineering. Abouelhoda has more than 21 years of experience in bioinformatics. He conducted his PhD studies in Bielefeld and Ulm University and received his PhD from Ulm University in Germany in 2005. He led and contributed to many national and international bioinformatics projects in the field. He obtained many academic and industrial awards and is a continuous reviewer in many bioinformatics journals and conferences.

Computer Scientist with extended experience in developing data solutions for pharma and bioinformatics. Working In Pharma, providing solutions on Lab Automation, and Data Engineering and FAIRification.

Andrew A. Anderson leads product and technology development as VP of Innovation and Informatics Strategy at ACD/Labs. Starting his career as an analytical chemist and regulatory CMC specialist at Pfizer, Andrew then worked in technology scouting at PepsiCo and served in a variety of sales management, business development, and strategic partnership roles in the scientific software industry.

Piyush has 15 years of healthcare and life sciences industry experience in advisory, product management and corporate strategy roles. Piyush serves as Frost & Sullivan’s Program Area Leader (HLS). In this role, he is dedicated to executing projects on growth strategy, advisory, growth analytics, and commercial due diligence for next generation diagnostics and precision health companies.

Sam Barnett is an Applied Machine Learning Engineer building state-of-the-art multimodal models to help in the fight against cancer. Sam has a PhD in Biophysics from University of Sheffield where he built super-resolution microscopes and used them to enhance our understanding of the architecture of photosynthetic membranes. Prior to joining Genomics England, he was a was a postdoctoral fellow studying mammalian cell motility at the National University of Singapore and then the Max Planck Institute for Medical research where he also held a Max Planck Guest Scholar Award.

Ari received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology with a focus on Neuroscience in 2005 from the University of Texas at Austin (UT). His graduate work focused on studying the effects of genetics on addictive behaviors such as alcoholism. His postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging focused on improving our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases of aging (specifically, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers Disease) by utilizing a combination of laboratory science and animal models, as well as bioinformatics and computational biology. Ari is also an expert in Scientific Computing specializing in high performance computing (HPC), high-performance networks, data centers, storage, cloud, general IT infrastructure, and bioinformatics and data analytics. He has been designing, building, and operating scientific computing environments for 27 years and strives to advocate for science and empower researchers to make discoveries from their complex datasets. His ultimate goal is to help create a dynamic enough abstraction of flexible infrastructure from research end-users to enable anyone to analyze and gain knowledge from very complex datasets.

Jonathan has over 20 years of experience leading technology organisations in the life sciences arena. He currently heads the global commercial operations for CCDC, delivering decision software for molecular design to users in over 80 countries. Previous experience covers start-up, scale-up, M&A, turnaround, and exit in tech-sci businesses.

I am a Senior Data Analyst at UK Biobank, with a background in human genetics and molecular biology. My work currently focuses on QC of large datasets and enabling access and usability for researchers at varying skill levels and fields of expertise.

Rob Brown is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Sapio Sciences. Prior to joining Sapio Sciences he was at Dotmatics as Head of Global Presales and Head of Product Marketing. Earlier in his career he was responsible for product marketing teams for cheminformatics and bioinformatics at Accelrys, SciTegic and MSI.  Rob started as a postdoc and later research scientist in the Computer Aided Molecular Design department at Abbott Laboratories, now Abbvie. He received his PhD in Cheminformatics from University of Sheffield, UK.

Derek Burke has over twenty years’ experience in scientific computing with the past sixteen years focused on high-performance data storage. Burke’s career began at General Electric and Silicon Graphics in the late 90s to mid-2000s. Since then, he has held senior commercial positions in data storage companies such as Panasas, Seagate, Pure Storage and, for the past 5 years, with WEKA. Burke is focused on bringing innovate data storage technologies to HPC & AI users. Whilst at Seagate, he briefly held the ‘VP for Industry’ position for the ETP4HPC, a public/private partnership advising the European Commission on its high performance computing strategy.

Ben Busby, PhD, is a renowned leader in biomedical informatics, computational biology, and interdisciplinary data science. With a career spanning academia, industry, and government, he is dedicated to making biomedical data science a more productive and collaborative environment for bioinformaticians and data scientists. Dr. Busby currently serves as Senior Alliances Manager, Genomics at NVIDIA, where he drives strategic collaborations and innovations in genomics, AI, and biomedical research. He is also an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, contributing to cutting-edge research and education. Prior to his role at NVIDIA, Dr. Busby was a Principal Scientist at DNAnexus, where he prototyped scientific data integration solutions and built complex compute environments for users of the UK BioBank and other major biomedical research initiatives across academia, industry, and government. He also led prototype software development in machine learning, omics, imaging, pharmacogenomics, and natural language processing (NLP), often through global hackathons that he organized and participated in. Prior to DNAnexus, Ben consulted for Johns Hopkins University, Ariel Precision Medicine, Deloitte, and NCBI, as well as founding the Bioinformatics and Data Science department at the FAES Graduate School on the NIH campus.His expertise spans biomedical informatics, deep learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, AI-driven knowledge graphs, and computational biology. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Octv Caldararu is a computational chemist trained at Lund University in Sweden, specialized in incorporating experimental data in biomolecular calculations. His postdoctoral experience at DTU included developing machine learning methodologies for prediction of macromolecule properties. Octav joined the Zealand Pharma team in 2019 to expand the computational chemistry toolbox of the medicinal chemistry projects with novel AI and ML methods.

Professor Sir Mark Caulfield MD FRCP FESC FHonPharm FBHS FMedSci – Short Biography. Sir Mark Caulfield graduated in Medicine in 1984 from the London Hospital Medical College and trained in Clinical Pharmacology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital where he developed a research programme in molecular genetics of hypertension, which has discovered over 1000 gene loci for blood pressure. He was Director of the William Harvey Research Institute between 2002 and 2020 and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2008. Since 2008 he has directed the National Institute for Health Research Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit and Centre at Barts. Between 2010 and 2015 he co-led the merger of three hospitals in North London to create the new £400 million Barts Heart Centre. He has won the Lily Prize of the British Pharmacology Society, the Bjorn Folkow Award of the European Society of Hypertension 2016 and the Franz Volhard Award of the International Society of Hypertension in 2018. In 2013 he became an NIHR Senior Investigator and was Chief Scientist for Genomics England (100,000 Genomes Project) between 2013 and 2021. Sir Mark was awarded a Knighthood in the June 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to the 100,000 Genomes Project. He co-created the National Genomic Test Directory and the Genomic Medicine Service bringing equity of access to genomic testing across 56 million people. Sir Mark is now Chief Executive of Barts Life Sciences, which is a £600 million Life Science expansion of Queen Mary University of London, Barts Health, and industrial partnerships in 1 million square feet of space in Whitechapel.

Ishwar Chandramouliswaran is a Program Director and technical lead for the strategy, planning, coordination and oversight of establishing a FAIR data ecosystem at the NIH Office of Director, Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS).

~ 13 years of healthcare and life sciences industry experience in growth consulting and market intelligence. She has a strong understanding of pharma and biopharma industry especially the Technology enabled Drug Discovery and Development and Contract Pharma services Industry with keen interest Emerging Business Models and new growth avenues.

A GIGA Society Fellow with over 25 years of experimental and theoretical research experience, Dr. Tom Chittenden is an Honorary Professor of AI in Biomedicine for the Digital Environment Research Institute at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Professor Chittenden is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and President of R&D for BioAI Health, where he leads the ongoing development and implementation of the BioAI Health Digital Pathology PREDICT-X Drug Discovery and Development platform.

Dr. Asha S. Collins is a clinical biologist, strategist, and researcher. She is best known for her work in biopharmaceutical operations and currently serves as the general manager of Biobanks for DNAnexus, a venture-backed, cloud-based bioinformatics company. Previously, she was the US country head for country clinical operations at Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. She was responsible for leading the team that executed in-sourced, late-stage, pivotal clinical trials across all US sites for Genentech and Roche. She also led the US Clinical Trial Sourcing business at McKesson Corporation, one of North America’s largest healthcare organizations. In this position, she successfully restructured the multi-hundred-million-dollar business that sources commercial products for research. Within the first year, she established a new organizational operating model, implemented a new technology platform, and standardized processes across a matrix organization that spans the US. Prior to McKesson, Asha was a management consultant focused on creating new operating models for leading biopharmaceutical companies. At Quintiles Consulting, she focused on operational transformation and optimization in clinical development organizations. She generated industry-leading clinical research outsourcing strategies and designed and implemented change management strategies. She also helped define the transformation strategy for three strategic partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies, valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. At Deloitte, Asha led the global process redesign of a clinical development process for the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. In addition to her passion for transforming biopharmaceutical companies, Asha is equally passionate about using her skills and experience to build communities. She is a mentor and angel investor for Backstage Capital, she helps lead community activities with Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, and she has ongoing work focused on improving healthcare access in East Africa. She earned a PhD in cancer biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in biology from the University of Pittsburgh. When not working on business plans for startups or Fortune 500 companies, you can find Asha out in nature, on a yoga mat, or simply out adventuring. Asha is a Fellow of the fifth class of the Health Innovators Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Peter Coveney holds a chair in Physical Chemistry, is an Honorary Professor in Computer Science at University College London (UCL), a Professor in Applied High Performance Computing at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and Professor Adjunct at Yale University School of Medicine (USA). He is Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) at UCL. Coveney is active in a broad area of interdisciplinary research including condensed matter physics and chemistry, materials science, as well as life and medical sciences in all of which high performance computing plays a major role. He has led many large scale projects, including the EPSRC RealityGrid e-Science Pilot Project (2001-05), its extension as a Platform Grant (2005-09), and the EU FP7 Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) Network of Excellence (2008-13); he is also PI on several current grants from the European Commission and other agencies, including the EU H2020 Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomedicine, CompBioMed and CompBioMed2 (2016-2023). He has been the recipient of many US NSF and DoE as well as European supercomputing awards (from DEISA and PRACE), which provide access to several petascale computers. Coveney chaired the UK Collaborative Computational Projects Steering Panel (2005-15) and has served on programme committees of many conferences, including the 2002 Nobel Symposium on Self-Organisation; he was Chair of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008, and of the Discrete Simulation of Fluid Dynamics conference 2003. He has published more than 400 scientific papers and co-authored two best-selling books (The Arrow of Time and Frontiers of Complexity, both with Roger Highfield) and is lead author of the first textbook on Computational Biomedicine (Oxford University Press, 2014). Coveney is a founding member of the UK Government’s E-Infrastructure Leadership Council and a Medical Academy Nominated Expert to the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology on Data, Algorithms and Modelling which has led to the creation of the London based Turing Institute. He is also a member of Academia Europaea, as well as the London Centre for the Theory and Simulation of Materials, The Thomas Young Centre.

Cindy Crowninshield, RDN, LDN, HHC has over 25 years of experience as an expert program developer and project leader for global business and scientific conferences. Since joining Cambridge Innovation Institute (CII) in 2005, she has been responsible for overseeing a portfolio of large-scale events. She started working on the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in 2007 and is still the lead producer. Cindy has created and delivered over 200 highly-focused executive-level conferences and events attracting international audiences of up to 18,000 delegates, both for CII and other organizations. In addition to her conference work, Cindy has two other parallel careers - 1) Licensed Registered Dietitian and Functional Nutrition Educator in private practice, and 2) Adjunct Instructor, Department of Clinical Research and Leadership at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She has a BS in Business Management from Fitchburg State University, completed graduate study in nutrition science at Boston University Sargent College, and completed certification with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition & Holistic Health. In 2011, she was one of the founding members of the Women in Bio - Greater Boston Chapter.

Laila Cunningham is a Westminster City Councillor for Lancaster Gate. Her top priorities are economic prosperity and crime reduction. She is a former Senior Crown Prosecutor and tech entrepreneur. Laila would like to welcome you all to her ward and give you a brief background on London and Westminster.

Lena is Lead for Semantic Data Products at Bristol Myers Squibb. She is a data science and bioinformatics expert with extensive experience in delivering value to her clients through effective data governance, data analysis, and predictive AI, particularly within the R&D and Healthcare sectors. With proficiency in FAIR principles, she actively contributes to pre-competitive consortia such as the Pistoia Alliance, ensuring that her clients are equipped with awareness of industry standards. Lena holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2011) and an MS in Biology from Universidade de Lisboa (2004). She has received 9 awards, including the Elsevier Silver Coin and the NASA Space Apps Challenge winner. Lena has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications in healthcare and life sciences, accumulating more than 1000 citations. Additionally, she has a patent to her name and has delivered 5 keynote addresses.

Dr. Jaspreet Kaur Dhanjal is an Assistant professor in the Department of Computational Biology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, India. Before joining IIIT-Delhi in 2021, she received her PhD degree from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) in 2019, and then worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Japan. Her research interests have been at the interface of computation, cellular and molecular biology. In particular, she is interested in studying disease pathologies in the context of personalized medicine, with special focus on cancer and rare diseases. She is also interested in exploring the mechanism of action of bioactive compounds from natural sources. She was awarded with the Har Gobind Khorana-Innovative Young Biotechnologist award by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India. She has co-authored over 50 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, and has also contributed in multiple book chapters.

Barbara has worked on the commercial side of life sciences for thirty years, first in a large organisation (ICI/Zeneca/AstraZeneca), before transitioning to the entrepreneurial world of biotech. Barbara joined the Francis Crick Institute in January 2018 as Entrepreneur-in-residence, where amongst other things, she co-founded, led and now is Chair of the KQ Labs accelerator, which is focused on start-ups from all over the UK who are making use of data/AI applied to health. She is also Chief Business Officer of Autifony, where she is responsible for strategic partnering, fundraising and commercial aspects of drug development for CNS disorders. Barbara was also Chair of Puridify, a UCL spin-out with a breakthrough biotherapeutics purification technology, which was acquired by GE (now Cytiva) in November 2017. She is a member of the investment committees of the LifeArc Early Ventures Fund, and the Cambridge Enterprise Seed Fund. Previously, Barbara was CEO of Stabilitech, and she was Commercial Director at Arrow Therapeutics until the company was acquired by AstraZeneca. Barbara was also Senior Business Development Manager at Celltech. Barbara has a BA and D Phil in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, and is a Sloan Fellow from London Business School.

Frank Dullweber is an experienced life science professional. His deep knowledge of data domains spans pre-clinical and clinical drug discovery as well as clinical development. Frank holds a PhD in cheminformatics and a M.Sc. in clinical research management. After a successful career in chemo- and bioinformatics, he now leads digital innovation initiatives in clinical development, helping to transform processes through advanced technologies and data-driven strategies.

Dr. Eckstein studied medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander University’s Medical School in Erlangen, graduated in 2015 and received his doctoral degree in 2016. He is serving as Senior Consultant in Surgical Pathology at the Institute of Pathology of FAU Medical School and University Hospital Erlangen/UKER (Director: Prof. Arndt Hartmann) where he focuses on general pathology, molecular pathology, uropathology, and immunopathology. He is member of the Germany Society of Pathology, the International Academy of Pathology (German Section) and associate member of the ESUP and EAU PI section of the European Association of Urology (EAU). His main research focus lies on characterization of spatially organized immune phenotypes of malignant diseases, immune evasion mechanisms and the crucial role of immune checkpoint proteins in mediating immunotherapy resistance. A further focus is the diagnostic assessment and harmonization of PD-L1 and other immunological biomarkers in several cancer types, especially bladder cancer and renal cell cancer, and in other immunological disorders. Since 2016 he authored and co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed PubMed listed scientific papers.

Tiffany Fabianac began her career as a molecular neurobiologist, focusing on peripheral nerve development and Neurofibromatosis Type 2 therapies. She went on to manage two neuroscience laboratories, researching in vitro and in vivo models for conditions like Multiple Sclerosis and Diabetic Neuropathy. Driven by a passion for coding and statistics, she transitioned to bioinformatics consulting, where she developed analytics and data science systems for top pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. In her current role, she leads the strategy development for AstraZeneca's Enterprise Integration & API Management team.

Based in Reykjavik, Edward Farmer has twenty years' experience in leading-edge population genomics and precision medicine. From 2000-2011 he was chief communications officer of deCODE genetics, overseeing media, investor relations and strategic communications for product offerings from drug target discovery through pioneering polygenic risk testing for common diseases and the first personal genome scan. When NextCODE (later WuXi NextCODE) was spun off from deCODE, he joined as EVP of communications and new ventures, leading key initiatives to enable online querying of large-scale sequence data for the Simons Foundation and to provide foundational informatics and rare disease and clinical interpretation capabilities to the Qatar Genome Project and Genomics England. As a consultant since 2018, he has worked for a range of precision medicine enterprises, and most closely with Genomics England, to advance the development and delivery of genomic and precision medicine that can improve patient care and public health. He studied comparative politics and Mexican history at Columbia University and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Octavian (Tavi) Filoti is an Associate Director at BMS, leading the AI Lab, and currently developing the Knowledge Factory Framework as a centralized company hub for knowledge consolidation. Tavi started out as a Scientist, culminating with a PhD in Nuclear Physics, only that along the way, Data Science sent him on-course with Technology, which started with an MS in Computer Science, and continued with technology engineering positions. Along the way, he has thirteen patents and counting, mainly during his five years of work at IBM Watson question-answering system. Being on the cutting edge of science to discover novel therapies and delivering technologies that patients need is where his science and technology allegiances do intersect. Tavi is passionate about machine learning and artificial intelligence as essential tools in bridging the science with the data.

I have been working as a Senior Data Scientist at AstraZeneca UK for just over a year now, after having finished my PhD in the field of functional genomics from EMBL-EBI and University of Cambridge. Previously, I completed my Master’s in Life Sciences and Technology at EPFL, Switzerland, and obtained a Bachelor’s in Biotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. During my PhD, I aimed to discover prognostic biomarkers for diseases using omics data where I focused on primary melanoma, Alzheimer’s disease, and COVID-19. My work on primary melanoma led to the discovery of a 121 gene expression signature that can stratify Stage II patients at higher risk of death within 5 years. One of the genes, GRAMD1B, was further validated in a zebrafish model providing mechanistic insights into tumour progression. The huge complexity of disease progression coupled with enthusiastic scientists motivated me to pursue this field of early patient identification even further. Currently, at the Centre of Genomics Research AstraZeneca UK, I am scaling patient stratification at the phenome-wide level using UK Biobank data to identify putative novel gene-disease associations.

Gian Marco Ghiandoni is an MLOps engineer and tech lead of the Scaled AI and Chemistry team at AstraZeneca. His knowledge and experience space across data science and engineering focusing on the development of services for research in drug discovery. Gian Marco's mission is to leverage data and algorithms to empower scientists in their quest in developing new drugs.

After being graduated in Physics and Chemistry, Olivier Gigonzac joined Rhone-Poulenc Rorer (that became Aventis, and then sanofi) in 1992 and held different positions alternatively in IS R&D and in R&D. Before taking his current position of Global Data Governance Lead in the R&D Data Office in April this year, Olivier has been Enterprise Architect in the IS R&D department during 10 years.

As co-founder and CMO, Stan is responsible for BioTeam’s branding and marketing, as well as maintaining his extensive network of business contacts throughout the industry and helping to maintain BioTeam’s client relationships. As the Brand and Marketing evangelist for BioTeam, he is one of the company’s most well-known faces and the connector that brings everything together. Stan joined with founding partners Van Etten and Dagdigian to form BioTeam following his tenure in business development with AVAKI Corporation, a pioneer in global grid software solutions. At Blackstone Computing, a computing and IT consulting company for scientists, Gloss led the sales initiative that launched the company in the life sciences market. Gloss earned his MS at the University of Buffalo and was a department chairman and faculty member at Quinnipiac University. Stan is also the host of a podcast, Trends from the Trenches.

Carole is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester where she leads the e-Science Group of Researchers, Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards. She has 30+ years’ experience of research reproducible science, open data and method sharing, knowledge and metadata management and computational workflows in a range of disciplines, notably the Life Sciences. She has developed production services for workflows, web services, and data management and co-led digital infrastructure projects and resources including the IMI’s OpenPHACTS platform and FAIRplus, where her team has worked on data FAIRification and cost-benefit models for pharma. Carole is the Joint Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK, the national node of the European Research infrastructure for Life Science data and was the ExCo of the Interoperability Platform for 6 years. She serves on the leadership team of HDR-UK and is a founder and investigator of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute. She leads flagship resources in the European research data infrastructure, including FAIRDOM for data management, the WorkflowHub registry and the TeSS training portal which are also resources of the ELIXIR-UK Node. She co-leads the ELIXIR RDMkit Research Data Management Toolkit. As a pioneer of Open and FAIR data and software in scholarly communication, she is an author of the Nature FAIR data Principles article as well as director of FAIR Computational Workflows for the Workflows Community Initiative. Carole serves on the Board of Directors of Sage Bionetworks, the SAB of Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, and 10+ other centres, and is the UK representative on the G7 Open Science Working Group. Previously she served on BBSRC Council for 5 years.

Dr. Gottardo is a Full Professor of Biomedical Data Science at the University of Lausanne and the founding director of the Biomedical Data Science Center at the University Hospital of Lausanne. Before that, he was a Full Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch, an affiliate Professor of statistics at the University of Washington, and scientific director of the Fred Hutch Translational Data Science Integrated Research Center. Dr. Gottardo’s current research interests center on developing computational and statistical tools for analyzing high-dimensional immunological data with applications to vaccine research and immunotherapy. He has led a large number of projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, to name a few. In 2018, he received the Mortimer Spiegelman Award, which honors a statistician below 40 who has made outstanding contributions to health statistics.

I am currently Phenomics Data Operations Director at AstraZeneca Centre of Genomics Research supporting growing data, informatics and analytics capability of the centre, and facilitating deep phenotyping research at the forefront of statistical genetics and machine learning. As Tools Platform Coordinator at the ELIXIR Hub, I was involved in engaging with the ELIXIR community around strategic planning for benchmarking and tools registry software, the Galaxy community to provide workflows and also developing best practices for the developer community in Europe. I collaborated with Genomics England as part of the Bioinformatics and Clinical Interpretation Partnership whilst at Illumina. At the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute I managed a large team of curators and developers and led the international GENCODE consortium for 6 years.

Anders Hogner PhD, is a drug hunter with +20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry in the field of chemistry/computer aided drug design. Anders is currently head of Computational Chemistry in Medicinal Chemistry in Early Cardiovascular, Renal, and Metabolism, BioPharmaceuticals R&D. Part of Anders role involves co-leading AstraZeneca’s CADD strategy, global lead of IT demands from the business, and part of team delivering AstraZeneca’s Augmented Drug Discovery environment. During 2017-2018 Anders also acted as interim head of Computational Chemistry for Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (RIA) disease unit. He has proven-track record of impacting projects milestones through innovative approaches resulted in being named co-inventor on 3 clinical drug projects and ability to bring in new methodologies and collaborations. He is passionate about talent management, mentoring, and developing people to achieve key deliverables in a performance-driven setting.

Natalia has a MSc in Biochemistry and PhD in Molecular Biology. She has been focusing her work on applying leading-edge technologies to the life sciences industry. She has been working in the life sciences tech area since 2012, following 14 years in bioinformatics research. She has experience working closely with clients to identify challenges and opportunities and then develop new solutions. In 2020 she achieved her dream of opening the HPC, AI and Quantum Life Sciences Centre of Excellence in Cambridge. She has developed her skills working for four important multinational companies: Bull, Atos, EVIDEN and now CGG.

Dave is responsible for Medidata’s customer-facing analytics solutions and building our customer data experience.  Medidata defines the data experience as the tools in which our customers interact with the data in the Medidata platform through analytics and direct connections.  Dave has spent the majority of his 20+ year career building data integration and analytics solutions for the life sciences and healthcare industries.  His experience includes building custom solutions (Deloitte, DRG) and products (PerkinElmer, DRG, iSpecimen) that leveraged open source (i2b2, tranSMART) and commercial solutions (AWS, Snowflake, Spotfire, Qlik, …) to enable organizations to develop insights and unlock the value of their data.

 

Ben has worked in Data and Intelligence roles supporting the life sciences industry for the past 15 years. At SciBite, projects focus on the applications of FAIR data. In this talk Ben will show some in house experiments using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) based approaches to power LLM models and ultimately make data more accessible to the end users.

Erin Kadelski is an experienced conference project manager with over a decade of expertise in producing and supporting large-scale industry events across the life sciences, technology, and telecommunications sectors. At Cambridge Innovation Institute, she helps deliver leading conferences, including SCOPE Summit, Bio-IT World, Next Generation Dx Summit, and their European counterparts, where she works closely with speakers, sponsors, and cross-functional teams to bring impactful programs to life. Erin’s background spans client services, marketing, and program coordination, with previous roles at organizations such as Yankee Group and Trendsmedia, where she contributed to flagship events including 4G World and WiMAX World. Known for her collaborative approach and attention to detail, she is passionate about creating engaging environments where industry leaders connect, share insights, and advance innovation.

Dr. Al Khleifat is a clinician and scientist in Complex Disease Genetics at the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute. Dr Al Khleifat trained in medicine in Egypt then obtained his PhD in Clinical Neuroscience from King’s College London. Dr. Al Khleifat’s research focuses on finding the causes of neurodegenerative diseases, and what might influence the way the disease manifests and progresses; particularly where this involves genes, environmental exposures, or lifestyle, or involves changes in thinking and coping. Dr. Al Khleifat is a sub investigator for phases 1, 2 and 3 of multiple international clinical trials and observational studies in the search for better treatments for ALS since July 2017. Dr. Al Khleifat is a member of multiple international projects including the Drug Discovery and Trials Optimisation working group co-lead in the International network for data science and AI applied to dementia and the chair of Trans-Ancestral Genetics working group in one of the largest whole genome single disease sequencing projects in the world: Project MinE.

Kerstin Kleese van Dam (2018 Woman of the Year Award in Science winner Brookhaven Town, 2006 British Female Innovators and Inventors Silver Award) is the Director of the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA, leading BNL's computer science and mathematics R&D portfolio reaching from leading edge research to operational infrastructure provision. CSI research focuses on data analytics @ scale – novel hardware to new AI methods for science, exascale computational modeling and quantum information science – quantum networking to optimized quantum algorithms for high energy, nuclear and condensed matter physics. We have a new, state of the art data center opened in 2021, that provides leading edge data storage and analysis capabilities.

Bridget is a senior conference director with over 20 years of experience in development, production and marketing of educational networking conferences across multiple industries, geographies, and cultures. Currently, she focuses on connecting biopharma leaders to advance pharmaceutical R&D in clinical trial operations, alliance management, data science and informatics, and program, portfolio and resource management.

As VP of Strategy & Development at L7, Teo Leahu has 12 years of expertise as a biotech scientist, process engineer & stem cell researcher. Teo’s career includes product strategy at IDBS & orphan disease vaccine development at Emergent. His holistic experience encompasses roles spanning process development, tech transfer & cGMP compliance at Merck. His background includes a BS in biomedical engineering from Yale & an MS in biotechnology from EPFL.

Dr. Joseph Lehár is a data science executive with over 20 years experience using data and digital technologies to enable precision medicine. Before his current activities at Owkin, venture and board member/advisor to multiple organizations, Joseph led cross-functional teams and drove scientific projects at J&J/Janssen, Google/Verily, Novartis, and CombinatoRx. His first career in astrophysics focused on gravitational lensing; at Harvard, Cambridge Univ, and MIT.

Hadas earned her PhD in the department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine at Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and then completed a Postdoc Fellowship in the department of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine in the Medical School Pitie-Salpetriere. Paris, France. Her academic and industrial experience includes the development of medical devices and analytics. In 2006 she established a company for home care service in oncology. In 2008 she joined Maccabi healthcare services where she established the International R&D Center, founded and served as the CEO of NEVET Ltd –the R&D Company of Maccabi Group Holdings. The company developed products based on Maccabi's know-how. In 2017 she joined Clalit health services as the CRI Director of innovation and business development, established and managed the data innovation hub with AXA entrepreneurship company Kamet Ltd aim to develop and commercialize analytical products based on healthcare data that can be implemented in Clalit and other healthcare organizations worldwide. She has long experience in international collaborations in R&D including EU-funded projects and the development of technologies and products for healthcare services that are compatible with the workflow and needs of healthcare systems.

Michael N. Liebman, PhD (theoretical chemistry and protein crystallography) is Managing Director of IPQ Analytics, LLC and CSO of United Cancer Centers after serving as Executive Director of the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine. He is Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, Drexel College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Drug Discovery, Wenzhou Medical University and Fudan University. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Center of Biomedical and Health Research, University of Massachusetts (Lowell). Previously, he was Director, Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics, University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center. He served as Global Head of Computational Genomics, Roche. He serves on the Board of the Nathaniel Adamczyk Foundation in Pediatric ARDS. Michael chairs Translational Medicine for the PhRMA Foundation and serves on the IUPAC Division on Human Health. His research focuses on computational models of disease that stress complexities of real-world patients and real-world clinical practice utilizing systems-based approaches for representation and analysis for pharma and healthcare. Current application areas include: multiple sclerosis, heart failure, and a focus on women’s health: triple negative breast cancer, hypertension and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, infant-maternal morbidity and mortality, perimenopause-menopause transition with an emphasis on underserved populations and health disparities.

Dr. Lynch has over 25 years’ experience in Data science & Informatics in various start-ups and biopharma. He is interested in making data more accessible for better analysis, and established Curlew Research in 2014, working with pharma/biotech and life science informatics/data science companies.

Dr. Cezary Mazurek, Computer Scientist, his professional activity has been associated with the development of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PCSS) since its foundation in 1993. He served as CEO of PCSS from 2019 to 2024 and at that time he successfully brought it onto the path of developing infrastructure and applications of quantum computing and AI, and is now continuing this thread with a focus on applications in Life Sciences and Personalized Medicine. Cezary's scientific activities mainly focus on applying machine learning methods for early detection of disease development mechanisms. A solution led by him to support pre-symptomatic diagnosis of glaucoma development using machine learning received patent protection from the Japan Patent Office in 2023 and from European Patent Office in 2025. He is currently extending his interests to advanced methods of data collection and analysis in a digital twin model. He is author or co-author of over 100 papers in professional journals and conference proceedings. In 2024 he initiated the establishment of a national consortium EBRAINS-PL and became the member of EBRAINS National Node Board. IEEE Senior Member, member of IEEE Computer Society as well as IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

Emma leads the Cancer 2.0 initiative – a strategic priority for Genomics England looking to deliver two programmes that will explore ways in which innovative genomic technologies can have a positive impact on cancer patients. Emma has over 20 years’ experience successfully delivering global clinical trial therapeutic development programmes across the pharmaceutical industry, working in GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim, Astellas and Alcon Laboratories.

Tomasz (Dr. techn.) is a senior researcher and an expert in data management and design of research data repositories. His areas of expertise include also reproducibility of computational workflows, auditability and digital preservation. In 2011, he received his MSc in systems and computer networks from the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland. In 2016, he received his PhD in computer science from the TU Wien for his work on verification and validation of scientific workflow re-executions. He was involved in numerous international projects: preservation of business processes in the project EU FP7 TIMBUS project; design of Open Access Repositories in the Erasmus+ ROMOR project; design of common interfaces for earth observation data centres within the EU Horizon2020 OpenEO project; as well as in the e-Infrastructures Austria project to implement data management services at Austrian universities. Currently, he is a principal investigator in industrial projects that work on provenance, auditability and trust of computational processes: FFG WellFort and FFG Obaris. He also chairs the DMP Common Standards working group at the Research Data Alliance that works to realise machine-actionable Data Management Plans and coordinates their deployment at major Austrian universities within the FAIR Data Austria project.

With over a decade of experience working in the Academic Publishing and Educational Technology industries, Shivendra is passionate about supporting Research and Scholarly Communications. He holds a BSc in Physics with Astrophysics, and postgraduate qualifications in Business, and Accounting & Finance. As a Senior Engagement Lead at ORCID in the Global Direct Members team, Shivendra focuses on growing member & integration adoption, and collaborations with Service Providers and Publishers serving the wider research community.

Giovanni Nisato is a Pistoia Alliance Associate where he currently manages the FAIR implementation project. Giovanni works as a consultant for bio-pharmaceutical organizations, innovation networks and digital health start-ups. He has 25 years’ experience in collaborative innovations in international settings across diverse industries. Affiliate professor at the Grenoble School of Management’s Biopharma Program, Giovanni holds a PhD in physics and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP/PMI).

Senior consultant in neurology and PhD in Neuroscience. Currently holding a position as Chief medical officer at the municipality of Bodø, Norway. Working primarily on research, development, and implementation of innovative and sustainable solutions, for current and future challenges within the primary healthcare sector.

Tudor I. Oprea is a digital drug hunter with three decades of experience in knowledge management applied to target and drug discovery. He co-developed ChemGPS, the “lead-like approach,” systems chemical biology, and a knowledge-based classification for human proteins. He co-discovered the first GPER agonist (orphan drug designated, LNS8801), GPER antagonist, and several GLUT transporter inhibitors. His machine-learning models include cheminformatics, drug discovery, disease, and target biology. His team maintains DrugCentral and Pharos, part of an NIH Common Fund project. He co-authored over 300 publications and 10 US patents and edited 2 books on informatics in drug discovery. He is CSO at Expert Systems, Inc., a San Diego-based i2020 Accelerator company.

Ketan’s background spans 20 years of experience working in the life science industry at Lilly, Pfizer, Oracle HSGBU, AstraZeneca, and most recently at Clarivate. Ketan has led and worked on data science projects in the industry from early-stage drug discovery through to clinical development, product launch, and medical affairs. At Oracle, Ketan worked in pre-sales before moving to product strategy for precision medicine applications. Recently, he was a Health Informatics Director working on Big Health data (claims, EHRs, digital, genomics, etc.) for AstraZeneca to optimise clinical trials, product launch and post-marketing, and lifecycle management. At Clarivate, Ketan leads the Data and Innovation team working on data products to help customers accelerate the pace of innovation in life sciences.

Dr. Daniela Jansen has held various positions in marketing, sales and business development, including at Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA, Waters & Bio-Rad Laboratories. Daniela has a long tenure of expertise in life sciences, laboratory & scientific informatics as well as in quality & regulatory compliance. Today she is responsible for the strategic messaging & positioning of TetraScience’s scientific products & applications, the development of marketing content with a strong focus on customer value &and industry needs.

Allison Proffitt is a science writer with a background in biology and chemistry, research experience in cancer biology, and an expanding repertoire in biotech, AI, and battery chemistry. She serves as the editorial director for the Healthtech Publishing media group, a growing collection of online news sites. In addition to Bio-IT World, her work has been published by Nature Biotech, Chemical & Engineering News, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication of science, engineering, and technology from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree in science and medical writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Fotis Psomopoulos, Eng, PhD, is a Researcher at the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB), at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), in Thessaloniki Greece. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus on Bioinformatics. His research interests lie at the intersection of Bioinformatics and Machine Learning, primarily working on the design and implementation of data mining algorithms for knowledge extraction from large datasets in Life Sciences. In this context, he was selected to be an EGI Champion on Life Sciences in 2013, an RDA-EU Ambassador for Bioinformatics in 2019, and he is currently co-leading the ELIXIR Machine Learning Focus Group. In addition to his research activities, he is particularly active in training efforts and initiatives (such as the Carpentries and GOBLET). He is the Training Coordinator of ELIXIR-GR, a member of the ELIXIR Training Platform Executive Committee, and was the National representative for the EOSC Skills and Training Working Group. Finally, he is a strong advocate of Open Science; he is a co-author of the Open Science Training Handbook and the Greek National Plan for Open Science, and an active mentor in the Open Life Science programme.

Prakash finished his PhD in computational biotechnology from University of Dusseldorf in 2014. He then worked at Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, UK as a scientific software developer. Prakash joined AstraZeneca in Dec 2019, working in various roles in the R&D IT. Currently, he is an Engineering Lead within Augmented Design-Make-Test-Analysis platform. He leads teams of engineers and analysts to build data and AI solutions for early drug discovery. His interest lies in the intersection of advancement in cloud compute, machine learning, and drug discovery and how this can help patients.

Did her Masters in Biotechnology and Ph.D. in the field of Virology and Immunology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. As Link Person in the Indo-UK Higher Education Link Programme between the Paterson Institute of Cancer Research, Manchester, UK and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, she worked on antibody engineering and Phage Display Technology during 1995 to 2000. She was awarded the Young Scientist Award by the Indian Immunology Society in 2000, and the Young Scientist Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India in 2001. While at AIIMS, she worked on developing rapid diagnostic tests for typhoid, rabies immunotherapy and dendritic cell biology in relation to zinc deficiency. She joined the National Institute of Virology, Pune in 2005 and helped set up and headed the Avian Influenza Division at NIV in response to the first outbreak of Avian Influenza in India in 2006. The Avian Influenza laboratories were awarded the status of WHO Regional Reference Laboratory for H5N1 in Southeast Asia in March 2008 by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Dr. Ray was part of the core group of scientists at the Microbial Containment Complex, NIV, responsible for work carried out in the BSL 3+ laboratories. She worked as Scientific Consultant to the Chairman, Apollo Hospitals Educational and Research Foundation, Delhi during 2008-2010 with special emphasis on developing capacity for carrying out stem cell research. She has been active in the areas of social welfare and justice particularly in rights based issues of gender justice and equality, rural employment, food security, education, health, rights of the elderly and judicial accountability for the last ten years which took her out of active scientific research into a more direct involvement with programmes and people on the ground. Dr. Ray joined OHSL in 2018 and is overseeing biomedical research at OHSL through collaborative scientific programmes and consortia. Her research interests lie in the areas of Ayurveda and cancer, immunotherapy, engineered antibodies and phage display libraries. She believes in creating a platform where young scientists and students can bring their ideas and where a support system of mentorship, collaboration and infrastructure can be built around them to further their research goals.

Craig Rhodes is the CEO of GEDiCUBE an organisation focussed on the early detection of cancer using multiomic and multimodal data. He has been a healthcare leader for 25 years, previously heading Nvidia EMEA Healthcare and Life Sciences, building collaborations across the clinical, research, and pharmaceutical communities.

Bryn gained his BSc and PhD in pharmacology from the University of Bristol, UK. Following post-doctoral work in neuropharmacology, he joined Organon as Senior Scientist in 1996. A number of roles followed with Zeneca and AstraZeneca before he joined Roche in Basel in 2006 to head up research informatics and data science. In his current role as Global Head of Data & Analytics within Roche Diagnostics, Bryn’s accountabilities include data strategy and engineering, data science, data governance, information, and digital solutions. Beyond Roche, Bryn is a Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, with interests in digital health, AI and machine learning, systems biology and scientific software development. He is an Associated Faculty member with the University of Frankfurt Big Data Lab and lectures in medical informatics at the University of Applied Sciences, NW Switzerland. He is a member of several advisory boards including the University of Oxford Dept of Statistics and SABS Centre for Doctoral Training, the Microsoft Research/University of Trento Center for Computational and Systems Biology, University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, RoX Health, and Z-Inspection. Bryn is a non-executive director on the board of Deepmatter.

Carl Robinson is a Senior Corporate Solutions Director at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). He is responsible for the strategy and direction of several CCC offers, including the knowledge graph (Expert View), our newer capabilities with deep search solutions (DSS) and how our professional services teams can support customers to get even more value from CCC's services. 

 

 

Philippe Rocca-Serra graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Agronomie de Rennes, France with a Diplôme d'Ingénieur before completing a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of Bordeaux (2001), during which he was supported by EMBO fellowship supporting collaboration the University of Oslo. He then joined the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), contributing to the design and development of databases, tools, and data standards for communicating scientific results generated by Omics technologies. He joined the Oxford e-Research Centre in 2010 and has continued developing his activities on open data and open science.

Harpreet Saini is a Senior Director of the Bioinformatics Group at Astex Pharmaceuticals, a fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) company in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Previously she received her PhD in Bioinformatics in 2004 at the Institute of Microbial Technology, INDIA, and completed her postdoc in 2009 at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, working on the genomic annotation of microRNAs. Before joining Astex Pharmaceuticals in 2014, she was a scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute, working on noncoding RNAs in germ cell tumors. At Astex, her team utilizes high-throughput multi-omics technologies & computational approaches to support new targets identification, biomarker discovery, and patient stratification for preclinical discovery and clinical programs.

Physician scientist with extensive experience in medicine/healthcare, rare diseases, genomics, bio-med informatics, digital health, personalised medicine, AI/ML in healthcare, epidemiology, public health, and global health. Worked with global, local, regional, cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams in UK, Europe, and USA across academia, government, and pharma industry. Produced more than 80 publications, public lectures, conference presentations, and Art &Science exhibitions. The digital health tools delivered improved RWD early diagnostics, WHO ICD classification, gene discovery, management of diseases, and clinical decision-making. Invited speakers across the scientific community and industry to communicate complex biomedical technologies to diverse audiences. For the importance, innovation, and quality of my work, I received more than 50 publications, posters, travel, and business awards. Represented Finland/Romania in the 61st Nobel Laureates Lindau Meeting to engage with 23 Nobel laureates and the 570 best young researchers in the world in order to build collaborative networks and advance science.

Since 2001, Susanna operates in the area of data interoperability, research integrity, and the evolution of scholarly publishing, working with and for researchers, service providers, journal publishers, library science experts, funders, and learned societies in the academic as well as in the commercial and governmental setting. With her Data Readiness Group (https://datareadiness.eng.ox.ac.uk), at the University of Oxford, she: (i) enables science by investigating and implementing methods, standards and tools to improve data curation and publication; (ii) influences data policies by leading and promoting guiding principles for data management and stewardship to support data reuse; (iii) prepares the new generation of scientists by creating and delivering educational material, to address the glaring lack of courses in these specialized subjects. An author of the FAIR Principles, Susanna has initiated and participated in a variety of community activities across disciplines, including: founder of the Nature's Scientific Data journal, member of several Boards of Directors (e.g. Dryad, Centre of Open Science) and formal standardization groups (e.g. ISO TC/276, EOSC FAIR Metrics and Data Quality Task Force). In the context of ELIXIR, she a co-lead of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform (https://elixir-europe.org/platforms/interoperability).

Erik is an evolutionary biologist. He is the FAIR Implementation Lead at GFF, Senior Researcher at LACDR, and Scientific Director at partners in FAIR. Erik is most known for his leadership role in the development of machine-actionable FAIR Implementation Profiles and scalable approaches to the creation of domain relevant, machine-actionable metadata.

Bojana Selinsek is a Senior Product Manager with almost a decade of experience working in the healthcare innovation space and start-ups developing medical products leveraging deep learning and other AI methods. She led a multi-million Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award project for the deployment of breast cancer AI detection product in NHS. Currently, she is responsible for delivering a cutting-edge multi-modal machine learning platform for easy analysis of patient imaging data combined with clinical & genomic data. This national-scale multimodal cancer research platform will enable a greater understanding of cancer, such as developing better predictive models for improved cancer diagnosis, therapeutics, drug development, smarter clinical trials and eventually improved patient outcomes.

Ben is an experienced Data Protection Officer and Head of the DPO Centre’s DPO Team. He has advanced data protection knowledge and works with organizations spanning the private, public and not-for-profit arenas. He advises companies on a wide range of data privacy compliance issues globally. Ben’s background is in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and legal sectors. As Head of DPOs, he also has unique perspectives across multiple sectors due to the valuable insights of the wider group. He actively contributes to the expanding data protection knowledge base and is a respected guest speaker at many events.

Alex is the Director of the Center for Innovation and Biomedical Informatics (CIB) at MGH and a Principal Associate in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. The focus of Alex’s work and research is conception, design, and development of technology, platforms, infrastructure, and methods for collaborative clinical research and optimization of clinical research in disease-specific networks. Other aspects of Alex’s research are patient empowerment, developing a system of incentives and supporting technologies to secure collaboration, integration, harmonization, and sharing of clinical and research information by all clinical research enterprise participants. Alex’s CIB team has introduced such innovative and break-through concepts and products as NeuroBANK, a patient-centric research platform and accelerated research environment, utilized by hundreds of investigators at 80+ clinical sites in 14 countries; PRO-ACT, a harmonized anonymized dataset of ALS clinical trials utilized to design clinical trials and identify novel biomarkers and disease models; and The SigNET Platform for unique and secure patient identification across research continuum. All three platforms have won the Best Practice Award from Bio-IT World Congress in Precision and Translational Medicine category in 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2020, as “outstanding example of how technology innovations and strategic initiatives can be powerful forces for change in the life sciences, from basic biomedical research to drug development and beyond.” Alex is the Chair of the Big Data committee of NEALS (www.neals.org) and is a founding Board Member of ALD Connect. Mr. Sherman holds a Master of Science degree in Nuclear Engineering and graduated from a doctorate program in Nuclear Engineering. For more information, please visit https://www.data4cures.org

Despoina Sousoni is in charge of implementing and driving ELIXIR's industry strategy, managing a range of industry engagement activities based on ELIXIR members' needs and EU-funded projects. These activities include support on the Industry Advisory Committee, management of Industry and Innovation Forums and a Knowledge Exchange Scheme between ELIXIR members and industry. Among her responsibilities is also enrichment of ELIXIR's industry network, and match-making based on corresponding interests, collection of industry use-cases and research on relevant contributions on open innovation.

Dr. Christopher Southan works at the interface between bioinformatics, cheminformatics, pharmacology and drug discovery. His current role as Data Scientist at Medicines Discovery Catapult, UK (working remotely from Sweden) was preceded by being Principle Consultant at TW2 informatics in Göteborg, Sweden. In turn this was preceded by Senior Cheminformatian for the Edinburgh University BPS/IUPHAR Guide to Pharmacology database team 2013-18. Prior to this he set up TW2Informatics, engaging in patent data consulting for SureChem (2011-12) and the AstraZeneca Knowledge Engineering Program for testing and documenting Chemistry Connect (2009-11). During 2008-9, he coordinated the ELIXIR Database Provider Survey at the EBI, preceded by a Principle Scientist and Bioinformatics Team Leader position in AstraZeneca, Mölndal (2004-7) preceded by senior bioinformatics positions at Oxford Glycosciences Gemini Genomics and SmithKline Beecham. He has a PhD in Protein Chemistry from the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich and a BSc Hons in Biochemistry from Dundee University (further information on LinkedIN).

Dylan Spalding is a Senior Coordinator for ELIXIR Finland at CSC - IT Center for Science in Finland. He is co-lead of Pillar II in the Digital Europe European Genomics Data Infrastructure project, and has worked on other H2020 projects such as CINECA and B1MG. Prior to joining CSC he worked at EMBL-EBI for the European Genome-phenome Archive where he was responsible for maintaining and developing EGA services at EMBL-EBI and coordinating and aligning developments with external project partners.

Anil Srivastava as head of Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL) located on the JHU Montgomery County Campus at US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Rockville, MD, leads the ICKA: International Cancer Knowledge Alliance and ICTBioMed: International Consortium for Technology in Biomedicine beside serving as Special Volunteer, Radiation Research Program (RRP) and Member, Quantitive Imaging Network (QIN) International Liaison Committee at NCI. In the past, he has worked as an international program coordinator with NCI’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (NCI CBIIT) where he led the IUCRG: Indo-US Cancer Research Grid initiative which led to the creation of the National Cancer Grid in India. Later he served as senior advisor for life sciences with Internet2 (University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) and Advisor to India’s National Knowledge Commission which established the direct fiber connection between the research and education network of India (National Knowledge Network) and United States (Internet2). He currently serves as Advisor, Biomedical Informatics for the Indian National Cancer Institute of the All India Institute for Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, and Visiting Faculty and Consultant on Information Technology for Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India. As part of the collaboration between OHSL and Tata Memorial Hospital he advised on international procurement of the proton therapy facility and planning for the center of excellence and research for carbon ion therapy. He has been associated with the conception and planning of the Indian National Cancer Institute of AIIMS from the beginning. Previously, he was a member of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. He continues his work as Advisor to the World Bank Group increasingly focusing on health systems and planning for non-communicable diseases treatment and research in LMICs (Lower and Middle Income Countries). In the past, he worked as a senior professional advisor with Booz-Allen & Hamilton in the Asia-Pacific region. He has several publications and research papers to his credit and has been a speaker at professional conferences (AACR, Accelerating Biology Symposium, BioIT, Indian Cancer Congress, Internet2, etc.). Biomedical informatics and establishing international collaboration in cancer research and treatment are his special field of interest and expertise. Prior to moving to the United States, he was the founding chief executive (1989-91) of NASSCOM: National Association of Software and Service Companies and founding director (1972-86) and head of Knowledge Engineering with Centre for Development of Instructional Technology.

Dr. Eric Stahlberg is the Executive Administrative Director, Institute for Data Science in Oncology, at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Previously he directed cancer data science initiatives at the Frederick National Laboratory, having led and launched several initiatives at the lab. He was instrumental in establishing the Frederick National Laboratory’s high-performance computing initiative and in assembling scientific teams across multiple, complex organizations to advance predictive oncology. Stahlberg first joined the Frederick National Laboratory in 2011 to form and direct the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research Bioinformatics Core, which helped build intramural research collaborations between the national laboratory and the National Cancer Institute. Since then, Stahlberg has played a leadership role in many key partnerships, including a major collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Energy. Under the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C), the National Cancer Institute and Department of Energy are accelerating progress in precision oncology and computing. The collaboration is rooted in three major national initiatives; the Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Strategic Computing Initiative, and the Cancer Moonshot. He has helped lead initiatives to transform data management approaches at the lab as well as more recently leading program efforts exploring the application biomedical digital twins for cancer applications. Stahlberg has spearheaded the Frederick National Laboratory’s contributions to a number of JDACS4C projects, including ATOM and CANDLE. He helped launch the annual meeting series, Frontiers in Predictive Oncology and Computing, and co-organizes the annual Computational Approaches for Cancer and HPC Applications of Precision Medicine workshops. In 2017, he was recognized as one of FCW‘s Federal 100. Stahlberg holds a Ph.D. in computational chemistry from The Ohio State University.

Shelley Stall is the Vice President for the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Open Science Leadership Program. She and the teamwork with AGU’s members, their organizations, and the broader research community to improve data and digital object practices with the ultimate goal of elevating how research data and software are managed, valued, and made as open as possible. The work of the Open Science Leadership team is to remove barriers towards making science more reproducible and transparent. We have compiled and developed resources that helps our broad community move towards science practices that are more open and make data and software more accessible and interoperable, supporting complex, innovative, and multi-national challenges. AGU partners with ESIP on the Open Science and Data Help Desk that is held at geoscience (and related) meetings worldwide including AGUs and the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. We work with the publishing community and supporting service providers to ensure proper attribution and credit for data and software citations that support published research articles. Learn more about Open Science and our projects on our web site (https://data.agu.org). Shelley is a member of the Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and an ex-officio member of the Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. She is the co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Organizational Assembly, and leads working groups focused on the FAIR Data Maturity Model, Complex Citations, and discipline-specific work in the Earth Space and Environmental Sciences Interest Group. AGU is recognized as an international leader in data and software sharing, preservation and citation for the Earth, space and environmental sciences, working across the complex research ecosystem to lower barriers for researchers to get the most out of existing data and software and make their own digital products as FAIR and open as possible.

Iman Tavassoly, PhD, is a systems biologist and computational scientist specializing in the application of AI and nonlinear dynamics and computational modeling to medicine. His work integrates mechanistic theory with modern AI to advance predictive and interpretable models of complex biological systems. He is the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Applied Bifurcation Theory for Cancer Systems Biology.

ELIXIR Europe Programme Manager for Scientific Computing: Tools and Compute Platforms & European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Coordinator at Cambridge Hub. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation (IGO) that brings together interoperable life science resources enabling federated analytics across Europe and beyond. Coordinate ELIXIR's leading AAI access and identity management service, LifeScience Login, and a range of Compute, Tools, Data, Interoperability and Training services on behalf of the ELIXIR Nodes and the EOSC Life Science Cluster. This includes software tools, Galaxy, WorkflowHub, containers, hybrid cloud and HPC. Our Nodes are deploying key services as core components of the European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI).

Dr. Mohamed-Ramzi Temanni is a seasoned professional in the fields of AI, bioinformatics, and data analysis. With over 15 years of international experience in large-scale biomedical data analysis, he has made significant contributions to the industry. Ramzi holds a PhD in bioinformatics and a master's in medical informatics from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Sorbonne University). Throughout his career, Ramzi has collaborated with experts from top universities, hospitals, and biotechnology/pharmaceutical companies. Together, they have tackled complex research questions using cutting-edge technologies and innovative approaches. Currently, Ramzi is the Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Systems Biology at Janssen R&D (Johnson & Johnson). Janssen R&D is a leader in healthcare product development, utilizing data science and digital health to transform the discovery and development of medicines worldwide. In his role, Ramzi develops and implements AI strategies that leverage multiomics data, aiming to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of drug discovery and development processes. Additionally, he serves as an Adjunct Professor in Bioinformatics and AI at Paris Saclay University. Driven by a passion for helping others, Ramzi combines his expertise in bioinformatics and data science to make a tangible impact on healthcare outcomes globally.

Irina is a dynamic and can-do professional in digital transformation within the Pharma & Healthcare industry. With her profound experience in life-sciences’ interdisciplinary environments, she advocates a distinctively process- and people-centric approach to drive meaningful change and extract benefits from data and innovative tools. Her project portfolio at d-fine spans a wide spectrum, from extracting robust insights from low data in the Global Health context to modeling drug prices, implementing AI within the pharma value chain, and developing applications and software – all situated within the complex landscape and interface of technology and people. She holds a PhD in bioelectronics and a Master degree in neurobiology.

Andrea Townsend-Nicholson holds a chair in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at University College London (UCL). She obtained a BSc degree in Molecular Genetics & Molecular Biology (University of Toronto, Canada; 1986) and a DSc degree in Cellular & Molecular Biology (Université Louis Pasteur, France; 1990), completed postdoctoral training at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research (Sydney Australia;1991-1995) and UCL (1995-1999), and held a British Heart Foundation Fellowship at UCL from 1999-2001. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular basis of cell surface receptor function in health and disease using a combination of experimental and computational methodologies. Andrea is particularly interested in facilitating the introduction of personalised medicine into clinical practice and in the development of computational methodologies that converge with experimental findings. She teaches medical and undergraduate bioscience students to use supercomputers as part of their taught university curriculum.

Séverine TROUILLET is the Chief Executive of STEM Learning UK, leading a purpose driven organisation thriving to offer a world-leading STEM education for every young person in the UK and supporting teachers with their Continuous Professional Development. Prior to joining STEM Learning, Severine was a Senior Director for Education and Public Sector at virtual tech company Dassault Systèmes, where she led on external strategic engagement and business development for public services and education. Séverine also worked in public affairs across Europe (UK, France, Belgium) at Walgreens Boots Alliance, the Institution of Civil Engineers, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, EU affairs’ consultancies in Brussels, and in Local Government. Séverine holds an M.Sc. in European politics and policies (London School of Economics), a Master's in international administration (La Sorbonne), a Political Science degree (Sciences-Po Lille), and recently completed a diploma in Business Sustainability Management (Cambridge University) and a Masterclass in Circular Economy (Exeter University).

Mariano Vázquez is co-founder, CTO / CSO of ELEM Biotech, and researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). ELEM, a spinoff company of the BSC, was born to speed up the technology transfer from BSC to the biomedical sector by creating a supercomputer-based and cloud-deployed platform to perform in-silico clinical trials on massive populations of Virtual Humans. Virtual Humans are "avatars", a combination of sophisticated mathematical and computational modelling and data designed to predict the outcome of different therapies. Powered by BSC, our team develops tools which allow us to study the cardiovascular and respiratory systems with customers in both the medical devices sector and the pharmaceutical industry. Infarction, ageing, damaged cardiac valves, arrhythmias, stent design, and respiratory drug delivery are among the topics where such a tool can become a decisive help.

Stéphane joined the BIOVIA team 15 years ago to advise scientists and engineers, from the lab bench to the plant floor and the executive team, in their innovation endeavour. With his extensive pharmaceutical and informatics experience, he helps industry teams understand how to effectively use their data and improve their processes with BIOVIA Discoverant and BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot.

Danielle Welter is a metadata modelling and ontologies expert specialising in biomedical and healthcare data. Her cross-disciplinary academic background — a BSc in Medical Molecular Biology, a MSc in Computer Science, and a PhD in Bioinformatics from Cardiff University — have equipped her with a unique skill set to address complex computational and data management challenges with an appreciation of the context in which data is generated and analysed. She spent 9 years as an ontologist and metadata expert at EMBL-EBI, working on a range of high-profile projects including the NHGRI-EBI Catalog of Genome-Wide Association Studies, the Experimental Factor Ontology, and the Human Cell Atlas. She then worked at the University of Luxembourg's Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), developing processes and products to support FAIR data management practices, primarily in the context of the IMI FAIRplus project, before joining the new Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS). Here, she develops services to facilitate the discoverability and reuse of public sector data, including sensitive data, for secondary research. She is also strongly engaged in the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform and Research Data Management Community via the ELIXIR Luxembourg Node.

Shelby Wyatt, PhD played a crucial role in building Genentech/Roche’s PHC imaging team – developing advanced imaging solutions and real-world endpoints. She was the business owner for Roche’s Global Imaging Platform & Annotation Solutions, powered by Flywheel. As Flywheel’s VP Global Pharma Strategy, she aims to empower imaging/data scientists, innovators, & healthcare professionals to develop solutions that accelerate/improve drug development.