Confirmed speakers

Nora Toussaint currently serves as the Head of Biomedical Data Science and Lead of the Health & Biomedical Vertical at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). She earned her PhD from University of Tübingen, focussing on silico design of peptide-based vaccines. During her postdoc at MSKCC in New York and later as a staff scientist at the New York Genome Center, she worked on metagenomics, infectious diseases, and cancer. In 2015, Nora joined NEXUS at ETH Zurich where her focus shifted towards the management of clinical and biomedical research data. She assumed her current role at SDSC in 2024.

Susanne Wegener is a Senior Physician at the Department of Neurology at University Hospital Zurich (USZ) and SNF Professor at the University of Zurich. She specializes in stroke and neuroangiology, with clinical expertise in duplex sonography, headache, EEG, cerebral imaging, and both primary and secondary cardiovascular prevention - particularly in women’s health. Her academic career includes medical and doctoral training in Hamburg, research posts at the Max Planck Institute and UC San Diego, and a habilitation from the University of Zurich.

Her research focuses on translational stroke science, including prediction of recovery in acute stroke, the role of microcirculation and neuroplasticity (KFSP Stroke), and mechanisms of reperfusion failure. She also investigates optoacoustic imaging in cerebrovascular disease and the specific cardiovascular risks faced by women. With numerous publications to her name, she actively contributes to the field’s advancement and outreach.

Combining clinical excellence with innovative research, she plays a leading role in bridging basic neuroscience and patient care, with the goal of improving outcomes and prevention strategies in cerebrovascular disease.

Guillaume Obozinski is Deputy Executive Director and Chief Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center, while also serving as a Titular Professor at ETH Zurich. He graduated with a PhD in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 2009. He did his postdoc and held until 2012 a researcher position in the Willow and Sierra teams at INRIA and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was then Research Faculty at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech until 2018. Guillaume has broad interests in statistics and machine learning and worked over time on sparse modeling, optimization for large scale learning, graphical models, relational learning and semantic embeddings, with applications in various domains from computational biology to computer vision.

Charlotte Bunne is an assistant professor at EPFL in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) and School of Life Sciences (SV). She is part of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) and the EPFL AI Center. Before, she was a PostDoc at Genentech and Stanford working with Aviv Regev and Jure Leskovec and completed a PhD in Computer Science at ETH Zurich working with Andreas Krause and Marco Cuturi. During her graduate studies, she was a visiting researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard hosted by Anne Carpenter and Shantanu Singh and worked with Stefanie Jegelka at MIT. Charlotte has been a Fellow of the German National Academic Foundation and is a recipient of two ETH Medals.

Michael Moor MD, PhD is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Medical AI at ETH Zurich in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE). Prior to this, he conducted postdoctoral research in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, under the mentorship of Prof. Jure Leskovec. He earned his PhD in the Machine Learning and Computational Biology Lab at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Karsten Borgwardt, and holds an MD from the University of Basel.

His research focuses on developing medical foundation models and language agents grounded in medical knowledge, capable of flexibly integrating multiple data modalities, performing multi-step clinical reasoning, and learning in real time from interactions. His work has been published in leading journals such as Nature and Nature Medicine, and presented at top AI conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, EMNLP, and ICLR. He was a recipient of a fellowship from the Swiss Study Foundation.

Gunnar Rätsch heads the Biomedical Informatics Group at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Machine Learning. He also serves as Adjunct Faculty at University Hospital Zurich and is a Core Faculty Member at the ETH AI Center.

His team tackles complex biomedical challenges with cutting-edge machine learning. Current projects include algorithms for medical time series, multi-modal single-cell and spatial data, and biological sequence analysis. He has led local, national and global research efforts, such as the RNA analysis working group of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, working groups in the Swiss Personalized Health Network and the LOOP Biomedical Informatics platform.

Mary-Anne (Annie) Hartley is an Adjunct Professor and Director at at EPFL. As a physician-scientist and global health innovator, she leads the LiGHT Lab (Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health and Humanitarian Response Technologies) with active sites across Rwanda, India, Switzerland, and the U.S.

Formerly a tenure-track professor at Yale, she holds academic roles at EPFL, Ashoka University, Carnegie Mellon Africa, and Ariadne Labs. Her work integrates AI, clinical research, and humanitarian response, including leadership in vaccine trials and epidemic modeling. With experience spanning Ebola outbreaks to COVID-19 trials, she has collaborated with ministries of health and global NGOs. Her mission is to bring intelligent, scalable solutions to underserved health systems worldwide.

Anna Fournier joined SDSC in 2019 as a Data Scientist focusing on industry collaborations. She completed her PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Luxembourg, where she analyzed large-scale heterogeneous datasets and leveraged multiple disciplines: Statistics, Network Analysis, and Machine Learning. Prior to joining SDSC, Anna worked as a Data Scientist at Deloitte Luxembourg, with a focus on computer vision and time-series analysis. Currently, Anna is a Principal Data Scientist based at the ETH Zurich office, where she leads biomedical collaborations with industry partners. Anna works on a range of projects in the Health & Biomedical domain, including protein properties prediction, biomanufacturing optimization and statistical model evaluation.

Jean Louis Raisaro is Head of the Clinical Data Science Group at CHUV’s Biomedical Data Science Center and Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at Vaud University Hospital (CHUV) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL). He holds a PhD from EPFL and degrees in Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering from the University of Pavia. His research focuses on safe, privacy-preserving AI/ML in healthcare, with contributions in federated analytics, secure cloud computing, anonymized data generation, and semantic interoperability. His work supports clinical decision-making and hospital optimization, and has been adopted by the Swiss Personalized Health Network. He has published in leading journals including Nature Communications, Nature Computational Science, JAMIA, and JMIR.

Snežana Nektarijevic joined the SDSC in 2021 on a mission to advance adoption of modern data driven solutions in the domain of public health care. She has a background in experimental particle physics with a Diploma from the ETH Zurich and a PhD from the University of Geneva. Snežana pursued fundamental research in the field of high energy physics at CERN for nine years, harnessing the power of machine learning and statistical methods to uncover the traces of new physics in petabytes of proton-proton collision data and to develop innovative particle identification algorithms. Since 2018, Snežana served as a Data Science consultant, supporting partners from industries such as manufacturing, insurances, compliance services and online platforms in creating business value from internal and external data.

Sabine Goldhahn is a medical doctor by training, who is fully dedicated to clinical research. She spent more than two decades in global clinical research where she planned, performed, and analyzed clinical trials. In her role as the medical director of a Swiss medtech startup she was managing the regulatory and operational challenges of clinical trials for market access. Currently, she is the programme manager of the MAS in Digital Clinical Research at ETH Zurich. In her additional role as communicator and science journalist, Dr Sabine Goldhahn makes research findings accessible to the public.

Jasmin Barman-Aksözen is a scientist and a patient with the ultra-rare inborn error of metabolism erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP). She is part of the University Research Priority Program “ITINERARE – Innovative Therapies in Rare Diseases” at the University of Zurich. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of ProRaris and International Porphyria Patient Network (IPPN). 

She studied molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of Heidelberg and obtained her PhD and Venia Legendi from the University of Zurich. During her PhD, she helped to develop the first drug for her own disease which is meanwhile approved in the EU, USA and Australia. 

Her research topics cover basic science, diagnostics and drug development in EPP and related diseases (the porphyrias), as well as ethical, legal, social and health economics aspects of regulatory assessment and benefit evaluation of drugs for very rare disease (orphan drugs).