Speaker

Alison Abbott

Oliver Amft

Evgeniya Anikina

Ralph Arnold

Bert Arnrich

Yan Beynon

Andrew Boulle

Erwin Böttinger

Jasmin Cirillo

Spiros Denaxas

Alexander Diehl

Hanna Drimalla

Joel Dudley

Werner Eberhardt

Roland Eils

Alexander Gleiß

Ricardo Jardim-Goncalves

Isaac (Zak) Kohane

Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He served as co-author of the Institute of Medicine Report on Precision Medicine that has been the template for national efforts. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales: from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism.

Over the last 30 years, Zak’s research agenda has been driven by the vision of what biomedical researchers could do to find new cures, provide new diagnoses and deliver the best care available if data could be converted more rapidly to knowledge and knowledge to practice. In so doing, Kohane has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. At the same time, the new insights afforded by ’omic-scale molecular analyses have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.

In 1987, Zak earned his MD/PhD from Boston University and then completed his post-doctoral work at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he has since worked as a pediatric endocrinologist. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in1992, serving as Director of Countway Library from 2005-2015 and as Co-Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics during the same period, before it became the Department of Biomedical informatics in July 2015. Zak has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored a widely-used book on Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Christian Lautner

Hans Lehrach

Christoph Lippert

Gernot Marx

Oscar Mayora

Markus Müschenich

Andres Metspalu

Peter Ohnemus

Jasper zu Putlitz

Lonny Reisman

Petra Ritter

Dr. Ritter holds a full professorship at Charité Berlin and leads the Brain Simulation Section at the Dept. of Neurology. She studied medicine at the Charité and spent a large part of her clinical traineeships and practical year abroad at the universities UCLA and UCSD in Los Angeles and San Diego, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the Harvard Medical School in Boston. Dr. Ritter is co-lead of the international consortium TheVirtualBrain. Dr. Ritter particularly focuses on the translational aspect of computational neuroscience and the development of accessible technologies. Her goal is to make brain simulation a powerful and elegant tool for everyone. Doctors can use it for reliable diagnoses and “dry runs” of individual therapies for brain diseases. Students can learn how our brain works. Dr. Ritter’s brain simulation work has spawned popular art installations (myvirtualdream.org) and smartphone apps for neurofeedback (brainmodes.com). Artists work with the mesmerizing visualizations of the brain and participants and users can playfully interact with their real-time “brain avatar”. More than 10 years ago, Dr. Ritter has started an international meeting BrainModes.org taking place annually at locations around the globe. She leads several research consortia including two consortia within the EU flagship the Human Brain Project ‘Co-designing the digital infrastructure of HBP: The Virtual Brain’) and ‘Medical Informatics Platform -Testing pathophysiological models of brain diseases: The Neurodegenerative Virtual Brain’. She also leads the Mill€15 Horizin2020 funded Research and Innovation Action ‘VirtualBrainCloud’ and holds an ERC Consolidator grant. Before entering the arena of brain simulation, Dr. Ritter's work was focused on the role of neural oscillations in health and disease and multimodal brain imaging with a particular focus on brain state dependencies of plasticity and learning. As a result of her group's efforts to understand oscillatory brain dynamics, plasticity and learning it became increasingly clear that computational brain models have the power to provide mechanistic explanations for the physiological processes underlying healthy and aberrant brain activity. Nowadays, the researchers of the Brain Simulation Section are working at the direct intersection between data and theory of the nervous system.

Marieke Rohde

Jan Philipp Sachs

Lee Stopak

Philip Quinn

Christian Weiss

Justin Whatling

Dr Justin Whatling leads Population Health management for Cerner outside of the USA. He has more than 20 years of experience in healthcare, of which 16 years have been focused on using technology and informatics to transform outcomes for patients.

Justin trained at Kings College London in Medicine with distinction, and has a first class degree in Molecular Biology. He worked as a hospital physician in world-leading centres including Kings College Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Queens Square National Hospital of Neurology & Neurosurgery.

Justin is an Independent Member of the NHS’s National Information Board, who set the strategy and direction for the health and care system in England on technology and information.

Justin is a visiting professor in health informatics at University College London in the Faculty of Population Health Sciences and Institute of Digital Health. Justin teaches MSc students studying health informatics, has published with UCL in the field of health related quality of life, and in 2016 established a formal partnership between UCL and Cerner.

He completed in March 2017 his third term of office as a non-executive director of the BMJ Group supporting digitising the evidence base into care provision. In this role he has helped establish group strategy, and new capabilities for health informatics and clinical risk management.

Justin is passionate about developing professionalism for health informatics. He is a Fellow of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, the UK professional body for IT. He is immediate past chair for BCS Health where he re-launched their academic journal, established strategy and policy function and expanded support for professionalism in the UK health IT workforce. In 2017 Justin is to join an appointment panel to admit the first 50 Fellows to the new Faculty of Clinical Informatics.

Prior to his role in Cerner, Justin was Clinical Director for the health sector in British Telecommunications Plc leading global strategy, business development, product portfolio as well as clinical functions. Justin held previous roles in Accenture and ran a health outcomes business on behalf of Bupa.