30 September 2021
Prof. Antoine Geissbühler is the new Chair of the National Advisory Board (NAB) of SPHN, succeeding Prof. Torsten Schwede. To strengthen the expertise of the NAB in the field of omics and data analytics, two additional members, Prof. Jacques Fellay and Dr. Marija Buljan, have been appointed.
Antoine Geissbühler is Vice Rector at the University of Geneva and director of the division of eHealth at HUG. Besides his broad expertise in clinical research, health informatics, e-health, digital transformation and innovation, Antoine Geissbühler has been involved in the SPHN’s National Steering Board from the very beginning and has profound insights in the goals of SPHN, its achievements so far, and the challenges that are yet to be tackled. Convinced that SPHN has the capacity to transform not only the biomedical research landscape in Switzerland, but also the provision of care and the responsible commitment of professionals and citizens for the development of precision medicine, Antoine Geissbühler is a great win for the NAB.
Geissbühler succeeds Torsten Schwede who has been a driving force throughout the conception and realization of SPHN, already before its official launch in 2017. As former head of the sciCORE center of competence for scientific computing at the University of Basel, he coordinated the BioMedIT proposal for the Swiss Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. From 2017 to 2019, Torsten Schwede chaired the Scientific Expert Board of SPHN and set up the Personalized Health Informatics Group of SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Basel. He laid the foundations for managing the groups’ two mandates: the SPHN Data Coordination Center and the BioMedIT network. Following his appointment as Vice President for Research at the University of Basel, Torsten Schwede passed the baton to Katrin Crameri on 1 March 2019. He remained an active member of the National Steering Board of SPHN and was elected Chair of the NAB in April 2020, providing important guidance on the infrastructural goals of SPHN.
On behalf of all members of the National Steering Board of SPHN, the Personalized Health Informatics Group and the Management Office, we warmly thank Torsten Schwede for his tireless commitment and valuable contributions to reaching the goals of SPHN.
Last but not least, SPHN warmly welcomes two new NAB members:
- Marija Buljan is a research group leader at Empa, Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, where she is focusing on multi-omics for innovations in healthcare materials. She brings to the NAB a strong expertise in the ‘omics’ approaches and computational biology as well as a broad experience in genomics and proteomics obtained at the Sanger Institute and the ETH in Zurich.
- Jacques Fellay, founding director of the Precision Medicine Unit at CHUV, head of a genomic laboratory at the EPFL School of Life Sciences, and Co-director of the Health 2030 Genome Center, will complement the board with his broad and longstanding expertise in genomics and infectious diseases.
SPHN looks forward to working together with these new members to consolidate the developed infrastructures and to foster the developing a sustainable and scalable health data ecosystem.