Keynote Speakers

At this year's summer school, Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó will talk about Law & Ethics.

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó is full Professor for Legal Informatics and ICT- Law and has been Co-Director of IRI (Institute for Legal Informatics) at the Leibniz University of Hannover since 2007. He is member of the scientific advisory board of the Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellence and President of the CDP, Center for Data Protection. In addition, he was reviewer for the European Commission for the FP6 IST (Information Society Technologies) funding programme.

In 1998, he founded a postgraduate programme on ICT-law in Vienna and has been head of this programme since then. In 2000, he became Professor of Law at the Leibniz University of Hannover.

Prof. Forgó has broad research, teaching and consulting experience in all fields of ICT- Law, mainly in data protection, copyright and electronic contracts. He is participating in several research projects, among others p-medicine and EURECA.

At this year's summer school, Brecht Claerhout will talk about IT security and privacy protection.

Brecht Claerhout holds a master degree in electronics engineering. He is leading the Research and Development Department at Custodix, one of the first Trust Service Providers in the world focusing on data protection. Brecht Claerhout is also the treasurer of CDP, the Center for Data Protection. CDP is a spin-off of the FP6 (6th EU Framework Programme) ACGT research project. Today, he is participating, among others, in p-medicine, EURECA and INTEGRATE.

Brecht Claerhout has previously been active in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) development as author of a major network security tool (Sniffit). He has worked at the IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Center) and RAMIT (Research in Advanced Medical Informatics and Telematics) research groups. He has a broad research, consulting and management experience with respect to bringing IT innovation in the health and life sciences application domain. He is particularly interested in the field of IT security and data protection.

At this year´s summer school, Prof. Lengauer will talk about Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Lengauer has been director of the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken since 2001. From 1992 to 2001, he was director at the Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing at GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology) in Sankt Augustin. At the same time, he was full professor for computer science at the University of Bonn. From 1984 to 1992 he was professor of computer science at the University of Paderborn.

Prof. Lengauer studied mathematics at the FU Berlin and did his PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 1979. From 1979 to 1981, he worked at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill as member of technical staff. After coming back to Germany, he habilitated in computer science at Saarland University.

His present research interests focus on computational biology, specifically, (i) computational methods for understanding, diagnosis and therapy of diseases and (ii) computational genetics and epigenetics.

At this year's summer school, Prof. Dr. Dieter Wallach will talk about Usability.

Prof. Dr. Dieter Wallach is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern. After his studies in psychology, computer science and information science, he completed his PhD in Cognitive Science at Saarland University before he worked at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (PA) and the University of Basel. Since 2001 he has been teaching and researching in Kaiserslautern in the area of User Interface Design and Cognitive Ergonomics. He is a User Experience Design Specialist with more than 20 years of working experience as well as Founder and Managing Director of ERGOSIGN GmbH.

At this year’s summer school, Stelios Sfakianakis will talk about the computational challenges and solutions to support personalized decision support in oncology in the era of big data.

Stelios Sfakianakis is a researcher at the Biomedical Informatics Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) in Crete. His work focuses on the semantic integration and composition of services in state-of-the-art computational environments such as the Cloud and the Semantic Web and the employment of statistical and computational approaches based on machine learning and data mining techniques for the analysis of high-throughput experiments, such as gene expression profiling and genomic sequencing. In the past he has worked in the design and implementation of a service oriented architecture for the realisation of the Integrated Electronic Patient Health Record using state-of-the-art healthcare standards (HL7, IHE, etc).

Mr Sfakianakis is currently involved in several EU-funded research projects including p-medicine and its partner projects CHIC, INTEGRATE and TUMOR. Within these projects, FORTH is responsible for the architecture and integration of tools and services.

In this year's summer school, Prof. Kathy Pritchard-Jones will talk about integrating complex clinical and biological data to improve risk stratification and treatment of cancer.

Kathy Pritchard-Jones is Professor of Paediatric Oncology at University College London's Institute of Child Health, Consultant Paediatric Oncologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Programme Director for Cancer for UCL Partners. She has 20 years of experience in clinical trials for children and adolescents with cancer and 18 years of experience as a group leader in translational research in renal tumours/sarcomas. She is chief investigator for several phase I-III trials in childhood and adolescent cancer, Vice Chair of the SIOP Renal Tumours Study Group and Chair of the SIOP Wilms tumour Biology committee. As Chair of the SIOP Europe Clinical Trials committee (2004-7) and then President of SIOP Europe (2007-9), she initiated the informal networking of the European Clinical trials groups that led to a successful European Network of Excellence for Cancer research in Children and Adolescents (www.encca.org). She has collaborated on several projects with a medical sociologist on information needs and issues surrounding consent for clinical trials and banking of tissues for research in children/adolescents with cancer and their families, is a member of the editorial committee that implemented the full publication of the ACCIS project in 2006) and has published over 170 articles in the field.