Prof Laurent Nicod obtained his medical degree in 1979 from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He began as an assistant in the Department of Pathology and continued his training in surgery at the Monthey District Hospital, then as an assistant in the Department of Medicine at the CHUV with Prof. Burckhardt. Then moving to the United States , he joined Prof.A.K. Pierce of the Division of Respirology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. Three years later, he returned to Switzerland in the Pneumology Division of the Geneva at the University Hospital (HUG) under the direction of Prof. Junod. He was quickly appointed Scientific Chief of Clinic, and became few years later, interim manager of the Tuberculosis Center and of the outpatient consultation at the Geneva Medicine Polyclinic, then ad interim manager of the Pneumology Division of the HUG. At the designation of Prof. Rochat in 1997, he remained staff member at the HUG and head of the Anti-Tuberculosis Center and the lung transplant program . In 2003, he moved at the Inselspital in Bern as Director and Chief Physician of the Pneumology Clinic and Policlinic, where he was appointed Full Professor and Head of the Department of Pneumology. His research work further focused on immune mechanisms in lung tissue. In 2008, Prof Laurent Nicod was nominated Head of pneumology at the Cantonal hospital of the university of Vaud (CHUV) in Lausanne where he succeeded to build bridges between the different specialties involved In lung transplantation, in the origin of asthma, in the new treatments of cystic fibrosis , in COPD and lung cancer detection as well as interstitial lung diseases.

Daniel Speiser graduated in 1982 and received a Doctorate in Medicine in 1986 at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. He then completed a clinical degree in internal medicine, with specialization in clinical immunology and (hemato-) oncology. In the laboratory of Rolf Zinkernagel (future Nobel Laureate), he specialised in infection and tumor immunology. Subsequently, he established his independent career in basic and clinical immunology at the Universities of Geneva, Toronto and Lausanne. Starting in 1990, he accomplished many R&D projects and clinical trials of immunotherapy against cancer, pioneering its introduction in clinical oncology. He demonstrated the in vivo importance of T cell avidity and contributed significantly to the mechanistic elucidation of the graft-versus-leukemia effect, and of autologous T cell reactivity in cancer patients. Daniel Speiser was the first to demonstrate in cancer patients that intratumoral T cells have a molecular and functional “exhaustion” profile, resembling the situation in animals and in patients with chronic infection. His innovative work is possible thanks to sound scientific work and knowledge, directly applied to real-life situations in the clinic.

Chair of Applied Statistics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Stephan Morgenthaler is Professor at EPFL, where he holds the chair in Applied Statistics. He studied Mathematics at ETH Zürich and was awarded a PhD in Statistics from Princeton University for research under the guidance of John W. Tukey. After initial appointments at MIT and at Yale University, he was hired at EPFL, where he has been active for three decades. His interests cover all areas of data analysis and statistical modelling.

Following studies in Physics at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETHZ), Antoine de Weck completed a DPhil (PhD) in Bioinformatics at the University of Oxford. He then joined the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Basel, Switzerland, as a computational biologist, working at the global forefront of oncology drug discovery. There, his team leverages the vast amount of biological data generated in-house and externally to support all stages of drug discovery, from target identification to first-in-human clinical trials.

Christoph Beglinger is the Head of Clinical Research at Claraspital in Basel and Dean Emeritus at University Hospital Basel. He is specialist in Gastroenterology and was heading the Department of Biomedicine at the University Hospital of Basel. Throughout his career, Christoph has taken leading roles in his field in various association to improve guidelines and policies. He was the president of the European Association of Gastroenterology, Endoscopy and Nutrition (EAGEN), president of the Scientific Committee of the Swiss Society of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and chair of the UEG Scientific Committee.