Thomas J Olesen
Commercial Director, Europe
Qualcomm Life

Thomas J. Olesen serves as Qualcomm Life’s Commercial Director, Europe, establishing 2Net as preferred platform for remote patient monitoring. He brings extensive global experience from the world of medical devices and in recent years specifically within mHealth and telemedicine. A native Dane, he contributed in making Denmark a leader in telemedicine working with the ministries of Science and Health.  Due to his global background having lived and operated the majority of his life in major markets such as US, Brazil and today Germany, Thomas J. Olesen offers a global view on today’s challenges and opportunities in mHealth.

Dr. Esther Rodriguez-Villegas
Imperial College
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Dr. Esther Rodriguez-Villegas, obtained her M.S. in Physics in 1996 and her PhD in 2002, both from the University of Seville. Since 2002, she has been a faculty member, currently an Associate Professor, in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, where she specializes in ultra-low-power electronic circuits and systems for wearable medical devices. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and a book on low power circuit design, published by the IET. Dr. Rodriguez-Villegas is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and has been a member of technical committees in many international IEEE conferences. In 2010, she won a €1.8m Starting Grant from the European Research Council. This award is the most prestigious one given in Europe since it aims to identify and support future leaders of research. In 2009 she was the recipient of the “Complutense Premio Joven de Ciencia y Tecnologia”, an award the recognizes the top scientist/innovator in Spain under the age of 36. In the same year she also received the IET Innovation award in Information Technology. In 2014, the team she led was one of the winners in the XPRIZE competition Nokia Sensing XChallenge, which recognized innovations which have the potential to revolutionize healthcare.

Dr Abed is an NHS medical doctor, corporate strategist and director based in London. He currently leads AbedGraham, a consulting firm specialising in providing NHS market research, strategy and medical director services for medium to large healthcare IT infrastructure vendors. He has worked with a range of leading IT providers including Microsoft, Nuance Communications and Infor. Additionally, he is currently the EMEA Medical Director for Imprivata, the global market leader in healthcare authentication and security software.
Prior to AbedGraham, Dr Abed trained and practiced medicine at St George’s Hospital in London before studying management at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He has written for several healthcare IT media sites and is sought after as a speaker in the fields of digital health and big data.

Prof. Wouter Olthius
University of Twente
Institute of Nanotechnology

Dr. Wouter Olthuis received his PhD in 1990 and is currently associate professor in the BIOS Lab-on-Chip group of the MESA+ Institute of Nanotechnology at the University of Twente and is as such responsible for the theme Electrochemical sensors and Sensor systems. He has been supervising many projects on both physical and (bio)chemical sensors and sensor systems for medical and environmental applications. He has (co-)authored over 150 papers (H=28) and 7 patents. From 2006 until 2011 he was also the Director of the Educational Programme of Electrical Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Twente. Currently, he is appointed officer on education in the executive committee of the IEEE Benelux section.

Prof. Ciara O'Sullivan
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Nanobiotechnology and Bioanalysis Group

Ciara O' Sullivan received a BSc in Analytical Chemistry from Dublin City University in 1992, a PhD in Biotechnology from Cranfield University in 1996 and then went on to lead the sensors group at University College Cork from 1996-99. She then took up a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (1999-2001) and was then awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship which she pursued for 1 year prior to taking up her current position as ICREA Research Professor and establishing the Nanobiotechnology and Bioanalysis Group at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. She is group leader of the GENCAT funded Consolidated Group INTERFIBIO. Her research interests lie in the development of electrochemical and optical biosensors exploiting advances in tailored biocomponents. Presently, her work focuses on reducing to practise cost-effective molecular diagnostics for screening and monitoring of disease, as well as on the development of aptamers for application in optical and electrochemical molecular aptamer beacons. The approaches for molecular diagnostics being developed include parallelised real-time electrochemical next generation sequencing, electrochemical array based primer extension and quantitative paper diagnostics as companion tools for the future paradigm of pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine. She has >150 peer-reviewed publications.

Prof. Jiri Janata
Georgia Institute of Science and Technology
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Professor Jiri Janata is Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Science and Technology. Between 1991 and 1997 he was an Associate Director of Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. Prior to that appointment he was Professor of Materials Science and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Utah for 17 years.
He was born in Czechoslovakia where he received his Ph.D. degree in analytical chemistry from the Charles University (Prague) in 1965. His current interests include interfacial chemistry, chemical sensors and electroanalytical chemistry with particular emphasis on development of materials for chemical sensors.

Dr. David Jenkinson
Cancer Research Technology

David Jenkinson read Applied Biochemistry at Brunel University and graduated in 1994 after placements in the UK and USA.  He undertook a PhD with the University of London at St George’s Hospital Medical School where he was interested in the signalling of mutant RAS proteins in acute myeloid leukaemia.  In August 1998, David joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) working in the laboratory of Professor Ian Hart where he studied migration and metastasis in several systems.  After leaving, he joined Gene Expression Technologies Ltd as a Senior Research Scientist where he was responsible for establishing the laboratories and leading a team of four biologists validating the company’s proprietary gene down regulation technology as a cancer therapeutic.  David joined Cancer Research Technology, the technology development and transfer arm of Cancer Research UK, in August 2003.  He leads on the formation of industry-academia alliances and consortia to answer key questions in oncology, including ways to achieve early detection of cancer, one of the Charity’s key goals towards accelerating survival rates.

Billy Boyle
Owlstone Ltd

Billy Boyle co-founded Owlstone Nanotech Ltd in 2004. The company produces the Owlstone detector, a ground-breaking solid state sensors device that used micro- and nanofabrication techniques to detect a wide range of airborne or dissolved chemical agents in extremely small quantities.

Joshua Ryan-Saha
NESTA
Longitude Prize 2014

Joshua Ryan-Saha is the Prize Design lead for the Longitude Prize at Nesta. Working with research partners and in in consultation with over 250 global experts, Joshua led the process to select the Longitude Prize challenges and managed the design of the winning criteria for the Antibiotic resistance challenge.

Prior to joining Nesta in October 2013, Joshua worked as a constitutional reform consultant in Bosnia and Herzegovina working with a range of  international organizations developing and delivering  projects  related to democratic reform and reconciliation.  Joshua started his career in local government as a participant in the sector’s National Graduate Development Programme, working at the London Borough of Newham on a number of transformative projects across a range of service areas including education, social care, housing, and crime reduction.    

Prof. Jonathan Cooper
University of Glasgow
Vice-Principal Innovation & Knowledge Exchange
Wolfson Chair of Bioengineering

Professor Jon Cooper has overall responsibility for the University’s Knowledge Exchange strategy and policies and for the University’s relationships with its strategic partners including industry, NHS, Government and Charities. He is also responsible for the University’s enterprise activities, including the promotion of spinout companies.

Jon holds an ERC advanced investigator award, a Royal Society Merit award and is an EPSRC Fellow. He has 240 publications in internationally renowned peer reviewed publications, with an ISI H factor of 40, see:http://www.researcherid.com/rid/E-9000-2010. He has also been involved as an academic founder of three spin-out companies, Modedx; SAWdx  and Clyde Biosciences, in the fields of medical diagnostics, drug delivery and new medicines discovery.

Jon was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2001) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2004). He was appointed to the Wolfson Chair in Biomedical Engineering in 2009. He has served on RAE’08 (EEE) and is currently serving on REF’14 (General Engineering).

Previously, he was Head of the Division of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering and a Dean in the College of Science and Engineering. He also held positions as International Dean for East Asia and lead the University’s strategy in Transnational Education.