Session 2: Validation | Taking models from lab to bedside

Julia Vogt is an assistant professor in Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where she leads the Medical Data Science Group. The focus of her research is on linking computer science with medicine, with the ultimate aim of personalized patient treatment. She has studied mathematics both in Konstanz and in Sydney and earned her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Basel. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC and with the Bioinformatics and Information Mining group at the University of Konstanz.

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 (Prof MD) is the director of LiGHT (Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health and Humanitarian Response Technologies) based at EPFL School of Computer Science with active sites in the U.S. (Harvard School of Public Health), Rwanda (C4IR) and India (Ashoka University).

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.