Panel discussion: Challenges and strategies for a sustainable collaborative data science ecosystem in Switzerland

Angelika Kalt has a PhD in earth sciences and was professor of petrology and geodynamics at the University of Neuchâtel between 2000 and 2008. In 2008, she joined the SNSF as Deputy Director. Her main tasks in this role were quality assurance, developing evaluation methods and improving research funding schemes. Angelika was appointed Director of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2016. She leads the Administrative Offices of the SNSF and is mainly concerned with strategic and political issues and national and international institutional relations. In 2022 and 2023, Angelika was elected vice president of Science Europe. This year, she is President of Switzerland’s Open Research Data Strategy Council.

Prof. Martin Vetterli is the President of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) since January 2017.  He is also a full professor at EPFL’s AudioVisual Communications Laboratory and an expert in the Swiss education and research landscape.

Martin Vetterli got his Electrical Engineering degree from ETH Zurich, a Master degree from Stanford University and his PhD from EPFL. He worked as a professor at Columbia University, at the University of California at Berkeley before joining EPFL as a full professor in 1995. He later served as EPFL’s vice president of international relations then of institutional affairs from 2004 to 2011, and as Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences in 2011 and 2012, and, from 2013 to 2016, Prof. Vetterli was the president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

He works in the areas of electrical engineering, computer sciences and applied mathematics. His work covers wavelet theory and applications, image and video compression, self-organized communications systems and sensor networks, as well as fast algorithms, and has led to more than 200 journal papers, as well as about 50 patents or patent applications.

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Since 2019, Prof. Dr. Joël Mesot has been President of ETH Zurich. As a trained physicist, he performed most of his research on quantum materials at the large-scale facilities of the Paul Scherrer Institute, where he was director for 10 years. Mesot studied physics at ETH Zurich and earned his doctorate with a thesis on high-temperature superconductors. He spent several years researching abroad, including at the Institut Laue-Langevin in France and at Argonne National Laboratory in the USA. Since 2008, he is a full professor of physics at ETH. He received several awards for his scientific achievements.

In his current role as president of ETH Zurich, he chairs the Executive Board and bears legal and political responsibility for the institution. ETH Zurich is regularly ranked among the world’s leading universities.

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Dr. Katrin Crameri, MPH, is the Director of the Personalized Health Informatics (PHI) Group at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Katrin leads the Data Coordination Center of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) and thus is responsible for the technical implementation of key milestones of the SPHN initiative aiming to improve secondary usage of health data in Switzerland.

One major focus of Katrin’s group is on FAIRification of routinely collected and biological health data to make it usable and sharable for research purposes, with a strong attention on data interoperability.

In addition, Katrin is heading the BioMedIT Board and in charge of the establishment and provision of a secure and protected IT infrastructure for transfer, storage, processing and analysis of confidential research data.

Katrin is passionate about improving the framework for biomedical research in Switzerland and is committed to better research for better health.

Prof. Raphael Sznitman is the director of the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research and the director of the Center of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at the University of Bern. After receiving a BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of British Columbia (Canada) and a PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University (USA), he was a postdoctoral fellow at the EPFL (Switzerland) and then joined the medical faculty at the University of Bern in 2015. Today, he leads the Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging laboratory, where his research focuses on developing novel approaches in computer vision and machine learning for clinical applications. With over 100 publications to date, keynotes at both technical and clinical international conferences, as well as several research awards in medical imaging and ophthalmology, his work has spanned both fundamental and applied aspects of machine learning, particularly with the translation of machine learning technology in medical products. He has also co-founded two key startups in the domain of AI and ophthalmology (www.retinai.com and www.perivision.io, Switzerland), both of which commercialize AI products for the healthcare sector.

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Gustau Camps-Valls (born 1972 in València) is a Physicist and Full Professor in Electrical Engineering in the Universitat de València, Spain, where lectures on machine learning, remote sensing and signal processing. He is the Head of the Image and Signal Processing (ISP) group, an interdisciplinary group of 40 researchers working at the intersection of AI for Earth and Climate sciences.

Lea Friedli currently holds a postdoctoral research position within the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Bern. After earning a master's degree in Statistics, she completed her PhD in Environmental Sciences at the University of Lausanne in 2023. Her current postdoc position, which shares the same name as the conference, aligns with Lea’s passion for interdisciplinary work and science communication.

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Silvia Quarteroni is the Head of Innovation unit at the Swiss Data Science Center. She heads a team of 25 scientists collaborating with Swiss companies and organisations to adopt data-drive solutions and integrate data science in their decision-making process.
Silvia is also an Innosuisse Innovation Council member, promoting novelty and value creation in the Swiss economic landscape.
With a MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York (UK), she has a research background in natural language processing at the Universities of York (UK) and Trento (Italy) as well as Politecnico Milan (Italy). In her academic career, she has focused on question-answering systems, human-computer dialogue and more generally on machine learning applied to text and audio. During the last 10 years, Silvia worked with several organizations as a technical lead, project manager and strategic partner in data science.

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