CERN Accelerating science

Noor is a serial biotech entrepreneur who is passionate about revolutionizing drug discovery with AI.She combines academic excellence from her Assistant Professorship in AI with deep industrial experience to advance technological innovations and put them in the hands of experts. Noor has published numerous papers in the field of artificial intelligence and is an inventor on a handful of patents. She is passionate about data and AI and on a mission to cure disease with the power of human and machine learning. She is a recognized healthcare leader, MIT innovator under 35 and in BBC 100 women.

Njide Ndili is the Country Director for PharmAccess Foundation Nigeria Office, an international NGO with a unique integrated approach that addresses the demand and supply side of the healthcare system, and uses the opportunities that mobile technology and data provide to leapfrog development in the health markets in sub-Saharan Africa.  Her work focuses on promoting basic health insurance plans and other innovative demand-side financing options to enable protection from financial hardship especially for low income communities; implementing quality standards and improvement methodologies for health care providers to increase transparency and stimulate efficiencies; facilitating business loans, technical assistance and investments to enable private health SMEs to improve their operations, and using data to empower the healthcare ecosystem with a focused digital agenda.  PharmAccess innovations include a HealthConnect App to leverage international remittance for health, Quality Improvement tool (QIT) for providers and regulators, Multi system Poverty Screening tool (MPS) to identify subsidy requirements, Mobile App for TB Screening (MATS) and CarePay digital insurance platform using the mobile phone to aggregate funding and payment for healthcare services.

Njide has over 25 years leadership roles in the healthcare industry in the United States and Nigeria, and has worked as a consultant to several healthcare organizations. She served as a Commissioner for the Lancet and FT Commission on Digital Health and AI -Governing Health Future whose report was launched October 2021, set up to explore how digital and frontier technology can be used to accelerate UHC especially for the young population and low-income countries. The Commission report is currently being disseminated and collaborations ongoing to support its adoption for data solidarity and better data governance amongst several other recommendations.

Njide has an MSc in Health Economics, Policy and Management from London School of Economics, AMP from INSEAD Business School France,  MBA from the University of Houston, Post Graduate Diploma in Finance and  B. Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Nigeria. 

Mark Kendall is a biomedical engineer, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur and business-builder in global healthcare.  Mark is Founder and CEO of WearOptimo, advancing Microwearable sensors for precision medicine. Health companies licensing Mark’s patents/technologies have generated a combined economic value of $2 Billion.

Mark is a leading innovator in producing technology solutions to global health problems; and a translator of commercial technologies focusing on delivery of drugs to skin and skin-based disease diagnostics.  This comes from 25 years of experience researching, developing and innovating: authoring >200 refereed publications, and being an inventor on >140 granted patents.

While Lecturing at the University of Oxford (1998-2006), Mark was an inventor of the biolistics technology, commercialised with PowderJect/PowderMed.  Then Mark invented the Nanopatch for needle-free vaccine delivery (featured in his TEDGlobal talk, which has >1 million views) as a Professor at The University of Queensland (2006-2018). Mark advanced the Nanopatch from concept through to a clinical and commercial technology platform for global health care.  This included Mark founding and driving forward Vaxxas (2011-2015).  Mark joined the Australian National University as Vice-Chancellor’s Entrepreneurial Professor in 2018, and founded WearOptimo.

Mark has received more than 40 awards, including: the Rolex Laureate Award for Enterprise (2012); and a 2015 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

Mark serves on numerous Boards/advisory boards, including co-chairing the Australian Stem Cell Therapies Mission, and serving on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Biotechnology.

Mark is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (FNAI), USA; the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), UK; and The Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE).

Gaoyuan Wang is a bioinformatician from Gerstein Lab at Yale University. Originally a physicist, she previously worked in various research fields such as cosmology and particle physics, where she participated in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. She received her PhD in computational soft matter physics from the Georg August University of Göttingen in Germany. Her current research interests lie in understanding biological systems via large-scale datasets using interdisciplinary approaches. She primarily works on the development and application of tools that provide insights on biological data. She is also interested in the ethical implication of the rapidly growing field of health technology, in particular issues related to privacy.

Ewa Stępień is a professor of medicine and medical physics at the Institute of Physics. Marian Smoluchowski at the Jagiellonian University. After receiving her MA and PhD in molecular and cell biology at the Jagiellonian University, she devoted the first 15 years of her career to the practice of laboratory medicine and the development of a number of molecular methods for the detection of hepatitis viruses and the application of new biomarkers of cardiovascular and kidney failure.  She is now pioneering development of application of positronium atoms as sensors of early tissue alterations at the intra-molecular level.

It is one of the pioneers who recognized extracellular vesicles (EVs), i.e. exosomes and microvesicles, as a suitable resource for biomarker discovery and drug delivery system design. Her work lies at the intersection of data analysis, clinical science, and molecular biology methods.

She also helped found companies like K2Biomedical, was the lead scientist, and funded the Theranoscope spin-off. She is a medical coordinator in the J-PET group for application cost-effective medical imaging.

Professor 
Vice-rector, University of Geneva 
Director, innovation center, Geneva University Hospitals 
Chief-physician, eHealth and telemedicine, Geneva University Hospitals 

Antoine Geissbuhler is a Professor of Medicine, Vice-rector of the University of Geneva, Director of the 
Division of eHealth and Telemedicine at Geneva University Hospitals. He is also the Past-President of the 
International Medical Informatics Association, and Fellow of the American College of Medical 
Informaticians. 

He trained as a physician at Geneva University where he specialized in internal medicine, then, after a 
post-doctoral fellowship, became Associate Professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University. 
In 1999, he returned to Geneva to take the responsibility for the design and implementation of the 
medical information systems at Geneva University Hospitals. In 2010, the telemedicine and distance 
education activities lead to the establishment of the World Health Organization collaborating center for 
eHealth and telemedicine. 

Since 2015, he is also in charge of the Innovation Center of Geneva University Hospitals. 

Author of more than 160 original scientific publications, his current research focuses on the development 
of innovative, knowledge-enabled information systems and computer-based tools for improving the 
quality, safety and efficiency of care processes, at the local level of the hospital, the regional level of a 
community healthcare informatics network, the implementation of the national eHealth strategy for 
Switzerland, and with the development of a large telemedicine network in developing countries 
(http://raft.network). 

Soumya Swaminathan was most recently WHO’s Deputy Director-General for Programmes.

A paediatrician from India and a globally recognized researcher on tuberculosis and HIV, she brings with her 30 years of experience in clinical care and research and has worked throughout her career to translate research into impactful programmes.

Swaminathan was Secretary to the Government of India for Health Research and Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research from 2015 to 2017. In that position, she focused on bringing science and evidence into health policy making, building research capacity in Indian medical schools and forging south-south partnerships in health sciences.

From 2009 to 2011, she also served as Coordinator of the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases in Geneva.

Retrieved from the World Health Organization.

Rolf Apweiler is Director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), together with Ewan Birney. Prior to this position he was Joint Associate Director, after many years of leading protein resources such as UniProt and InterPro. Rolf has made a major contribution to methods for the automatic annotation of proteins, making it possible to add relevant information to proteome sets for entire organisms. He has spearheaded the development of standards for proteomics data, and his teams have maintained major collections of protein identifications from proteomics experiments (PRIDE) and molecular interactions (IntAct). He also led EMBL-EBI’s contribution to the Gene Ontology, was Director of Open Targets, and is now leading the efforts of EMBL-EBI around the European COVID-19 Data Platform.

Rolf received his PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 1994, and has been at EMBL since 1987. His major contribution to the field of proteomics was recognised by the the Human Proteomics Organisation’s “Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomics” in 2004 and his election to President of the Human Proteomics Organisation, which he held in 2007 and 2008. In 2012, he was elected as a member of EMBO, in 2015 he was elected to an ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) fellow, and in 2022 he was elected to a Member of the Academia Europaea. Rolf also served over many years on a multitude of Editorial Boards and Scientific Advisory Boards.

Pushmeet Kohli is the Head of AI for Science at DeepMind, leading efforts including AlphaFold, a state-of-the-art AI system for predicting the 3D structure of proteins. Prior to this, he was the director of research at the Cognition group at Microsoft Research. 

Pushmeet's research centres on using AI to solve impactful real world science-related problems. He is particularly interested in the use of machine learning techniques to enable and accelerate life sciences research, and the use of this knowledge for understanding and intervening in disease. Pushmeet also actively leads research on new techniques to ensure that AI systems are safe, reliable and trustworthy.

Pushmeet’s papers have won multiple awards and appeared in conferences in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, game theory and human computer interaction. His research has also been covered by popular media outlets such as Wired, Forbes, BBC, New Scientist and MIT Technology Review.

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Snyder has pioneered the use of “big data” and multiomics to advance scientific discovery and transform healthcare. His laboratory has invented many technologies that are widely used in medicine and research, including methods for characterizing genomes and their products (e.g. RNA-Seq, NGS paired end sequencing, ChIP-Chip and later Chip-Seq, protein arrays, machine learning for disease gene discovery). His application of omics and wearables technologies to perform longitudinal profiling of people when they are healthy and ill is transforming medicine and healthcare. Indeed, his laboratory’s recent work to use smartwatches and wearables to detect illness, including infectious disease such as COVID-19, prior to symptom onset is being used by many thousands of people.