Plenary Speakers

Dr Fiona Adshead
Chair
Sustainable Healthcare Coalition
United Kingdom

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Fiona chairs the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition that inspires partnerships and action on sustainable healthcare. She also works as an independent expert advisor and board member for national and global organisations on wellbeing and sustainability.

She is a high-profile wellbeing and public health leader with a track record of reframing thinking and developing innovative strategy and programmes at the heart of business and government. Her previous roles include Deputy Chief Medical Officer and Director General in the UK Government, Director of Chronic Disease and Health Promotion at the World Health Organisation and Bupa’s Chief Wellbeing Officer.

Fiona is a visiting Professor at UCL and is a Senior Associate at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Fiona’s recent board roles include Fresenius ESG Advisory Board, My Green Lab, British Land’s Sustainability Advisory Panel, Marks and Spencer’s Sustainable Retail Advisory Board, and Business in the Community’s Wellbeing Leadership Team. Fiona is a member of the Health System Taskforce of the Sustainable Markets Initiative.

Prof Maryellen Giger
A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology Committee on Medical Physics
University of Chicago
United States

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Maryellen Giger, Ph.D. is the A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics, and the College at the University of Chicago. Her AI research in cancer, neuro-imaging, COVID-19, and other diseases for risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic response has yielded various translated components, including “virtual biopsies” in imaging-genomics association studies. She is contact PI on the NIBIB-funded Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC; midrc.org), which has ingested more than 500,000 medical imaging studies, with currently more than 190,000 imaging studies publicly available for use by AI investigators. In 2023, MIDRC was selected as an initial performer in ARPA-H, and received the 2023 DataWorks Prize [FASEB and NIH Office of Data Science Strategy: Distinguished Achievement Award, “MIDRC – Sharable Curated Diverse Medical Images at Scale”]. Giger has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and has more than 30 patents, and has mentored over 120 graduate students, residents, medical students, and undergraduate students. Giger is a former president of AAPM and of SPIE; a past member of the NIBIB Advisory Council of NIH; and past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Imaging (2013-2023); a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a recipient of the AAPM William D. Coolidge Gold Medal, the SPIE Director’s Award, the SPIE Harrison H. Barrett Award in Medical Imaging, the RSNA’s Honored Educator Award, and the RSNA’s Outstanding Researcher Award, and is a Fellow of AAPM, AIMBE, SPIE, SBMR, IEEE, IAMBE, and COS. In 2013, Giger was named by the International Congress on Medical Physics (ICMP) as one of 50 medical physicists with the most impact on the field in the last 50 years. Giger was cofounder of Quantitative Insights, Inc., which started through the 2009-2010 New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago. QI produced QuantX, which in 2017, became the first FDA-cleared, machine-learning-driven system to aid in cancer diagnosis (CADx). In 2019, QuantX was named one of TIME magazine’s inventions of the year and was bought by Qlarity Imaging.

Prof Simon Cherry
Professor of Biomedical Engineering
University of California, Davis
United States

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Simon R. Cherry, Ph.D. received his B.Sc.(Hons) in Physics with Astronomy from University College London in 1986 and a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the Institute of Cancer Research, University of London in 1989. In 1993, he became a faculty member in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. Simon joined UC Davis in 2001 and is currently Distinguished Research Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology.

Simon’s research interests center around biomedical imaging. His major contributions have been in developing systems for positron emission tomography, for example as co-leader of the EXPLORER consortium which developed the world’s first total-body PET scanner. He also has contributed to detector technology innovations for PET, conducted early biomedical studies using Cerenkov luminescence, and developed the first proof-of-concept hybrid PET/MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) systems.

Simon is an elected fellow of six professional societies and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Inventors. He has received several international awards including the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Cassen Prize in 2022. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology from 2011-2020. Simon is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, review articles and book chapters in the field of biomedical imaging. He is also lead author of the widely-used textbook “Physics in Nuclear Medicine”.

 

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Dr Lars Juhl Jensen
Director
ZS Discovery
Denmark

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Lars Juhl Jensen started his research career in Søren Brunak’s group at the Technical University of Denmark, from where he in 2002 received the Ph.D. degree in bioinformatics, having worked on methods for protein function prediction, visualization of microbial genomes, pattern recognition in promoter regions, and microarray analysis. From 2003 to 2008, he was at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory working on text mining, integration of omics data, and network analysis. From 2009 to 2024, he continued this line of research as a professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen. He was a founder and scientific advisor of the bioinformatics company Intomics, now ZS Discovery, which he joined as a Director in 2025 to lead efforts on AI for molecular data.

He has authored and co-authored more than 250 scientific publications that have received over 100,000 citations in total. He was awarded the Lundbeck Foundation Talent Prize in 2003, “Break-through of the Year” in 2006 by the magazine Ingeniøren, and the Lundbeck Foundation Prize for Young Scientists in 2010.

Dr Jitendra Sharma
Managing Director and Founder CEO
Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone (AMTZ)
India

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Dr Jitendra Sharma is the Managing Director & Founder CEO of Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone, which is world’s first medical devices manufacturing park. He is Founder Executive Director of Kalam Institute of Health Technology that serves as medical technology policy institute to various Ministries of Government of India. He led the setting up of Kalam Institute of Health Technology as a gratitude to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. He is Member Secretary of National Medical Devices Promotion Council, and founder Chairman of two med-tech incubators, Medi-Valley and Bio-Valley. He is adjunct lecturer at University of Adelaide, Australia; Chairman of Indian Biomedical Skill Council and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Niti Aayog, Government of India. He has been appointed as the Member of Global Strategic Advisory Group of WHO Headquarters, Geneva Switzerland.

Dr JK Sharma created AMTZ – as the pioneering hub for medical devices putting India on the global footprint for medical devices. More importantly, he built AMTZ, a mini city for producing medical devices in a 300-acre greenfield campus in just 342 days, setting up records on global scale. Owing to his work, the WHO headquarters at Geneva, for the first time, decided to host the WHO Global Forum for Medical Devices in India, at AMTZ, Vizag bringing in over delegates from over 100 countries, to celebrate the success of creation of AMTZ. This is considered as a major diplomatic achievement for India, on global scale in medical technology.