Emmanouil Dermitzakis, PhD

Professor of Genetics, University of Geneva

Director, Health 2030 Genome Center

 Emmanouil (Manolis) Dermitzakis is Professor of Genetics in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development, University of Geneva Medical School and Director of the Health2030 Genome Center. He is member of the executive boards of the Institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva (iGE3) and the Swiss Personalized Health Network, and also a member of the SIB.

He obtained his B.Sc. (1995) and M.Sc. (1997) from the University of Crete (Greece) and his PhD in 2001 from the Pennsylvania State University in the USA. His post-doctoral work was at the University of Geneva Medical School.

He previously was a Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge. He was elected EMBO member in 2014, recipient of the 2017 Bodossakis science award and has been named Highly Cited Researcher by ISI every year from 2014 to 2019. He also served as president of the World Hellenic Biomedical Association (2014-2015). His research focuses on the genetic causes of human disease. He has had leading roles in the ENCODE, Mouse Genome Sequencing, the International HapMap, the 1000 genomes and GTEx projects. He has served in the Board of scientific journals such as Science, eLIFE, PLoS Genetics and is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Genetics.

Antoine Geissbuhler is a Professor of Medicine, Vice-rector in charge of digital transformation and innovation at the University of Geneva, Director of the Division of eHealth and Telemedicine at Geneva University Hospitals and director of the hospitals’ Innovation Center.

He is also Past-President of the International Medical Informatics Association, and Fellow of the American College of Medical Informaticians.

His 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, and on the evaluation of their impact on health outcomes, at the local level of the largest hospital in Switzerland, in the regional patient-centered health information system, at the global level as director of the WHO collaborating center for eHealth, and as director of the RAFT network, an extensive South-South telemedicine network linking hundreds of hospitals in 20+ developing countries (http://raft.network)

Marcel Salathé is a digital epidemiologist working at the interface
of health and computer science. He obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich
and spent two years as a postdoc in Stanford before joining the
faculty at Penn State University in 2010 at the Center for Infectious
Disease Dynamics. In 2014, he spent half a year at Stanford as
visiting assistant professor. In the summer of 2015, he became an
Associate Professor at EPFL where he heads the Digital
Epidemiology Lab at the Campus Biotech in Geneva. In 2016, he
founded the EPFL Extension School, whose mission is to provide
high quality online education in digital technology, and where he is the Academic Director.

Marcel Salathé works at the forefront of artificial intelligence and its application on health and other domains. His lab created crowdAI.org, an open AI challenge platform whose goal is to accelerate research on big data across multiple scientific domains, and which is used by organizations such as the UN, Microsoft, Google, SBB, Stanford University, and many others. He is the initiator and co-organiser of the “Applied Machine Learning Days”, now one of Europe’s largest conferences on the application of machine learning across all domains.

Co-founded PlantVillage, a knowledge exchange and AI platform on crop diseases, and the FoodRepo project, a suite of AI-based platforms, tools and datasets to advance personalized nutrition.

He published numerous scientific papers in the biological, medical, and computational fields.

Marcel spent a few years in the tech industry as web application developer. He was part of the renowned Y Combinator startup accelerator’s class of Winter 2014. In 2018, he was elected as one of the 100 Digital Shapers in Switzerland by Bilanz and Digital Swizterland.