Speakers

Prof. Dr. Andries van der Meer is a Principal Investigator in the Bioengineering Technologies department at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He leads a research group in which he develops Organs-on-Chips, with a particular focus on the functional integration of blood vessels in these systems, including their dynamic perfusion with human blood. He is also a Scientific Lead of the university’s Organ-on-Chip Centre Twente, the Chair of the consortium assembly of the Dutch national Institute for Human Organ and Disease Model Technologies (hDMT), and the elected president of the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS). He is also chair of the Focus Group on Standardization for Organ-on-Chip of the European standardization body CEN CENELEC.

Before joining the University of Twente in 2015, Dr. Van der Meer worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering (University of Twente, 2010), and a MSc in Biomedical Science (University of Groningen, 2005).

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Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Bioethics and Medicine, professor of medicine, professor of Health Policy and Management, and deputy director for medicine of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at the Johns Hopkins University. He is an internationally recognized leader in bioethics with particular expertise in applying empirical methods and evidence-based standards for evaluating and analyzing bioethical issues. His contributions to bioethics and policy include his work on the ethics of informed consent, umbilical cord blood banking, stem cell research, international HIV prevention research, global health and research oversight.

Dr. Sugarman is the author of over 400 articles, reviews and book chapters.  He has also edited or co-edited four books (Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research; Ethics of Research with Human Subjects: Selected Policies and Resources; Ethics in Primary Care; and Methods in Medical Ethics).  Dr. Sugarman is on the editorial boards of several academic journals.

Dr. Sugarman consults and speaks internationally on a range of issues related to bioethics. He was senior policy and research analyst for the White House Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, consultant to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and Senior Advisor to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He also served on the Maryland Stem Cell Research Commission.

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Katriina Aalto-Setälä, M.D. , PhD,  is the Professor of Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, Tampere University and a cardiologist at the Heart Hospital, Tampere University Hospital, Tampere, Finland.  She works as an invasive cardiologist and is in charge of the genetic cardiac outpatient clinic at the Heart Hospital. Her research at the Tampere University focuses both on human genetic cardiac diseases such as genetic arrhythmias and cardiomyopathias and acquired cardiac diseases such as myocardial infarction with the help of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology. The main aim of the research group is to learn more about the basic pathology of heart diseases as well as to test current and new pharmaceutical agents to correct the abnormalities.

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Olli Kallioniemi, M.D ., Ph.D., is an expert in technology-, data-, and AI-driven precision medicine. He received his M.D. in 1984 and Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Tampere in Finland. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco, he has held PI roles and professorships in Tampere, Turku, Helsinki, the NHGRI at the NIH in the US, and at Karolinska Institutet and SciLifeLab in Sweden. He has also had several leadership roles, including serving as the founding director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) from 2007 to 2015 and as Director of the Science for Life Laboratory in Sweden (2015-2024, www.SciLifeLab.se).

Currently, Olli Kallioniemi is the director of the SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (www.scilifelab.se/data-driven/about/) and is establishing a new research program at FIMM at the University of Helsinki focusing on applications of AI in medical research. Olli Kallioniemi has 420 publications listed in PubMed and has been a co-inventor on dozens of patents and patent applications. He has held a professorship in Molecular Precision Medicine at Karolinska Institutet since 2015. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the European Academy of Cancer Sciences, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.