Speakers

Alena Buyx is Professor of Ethics in Medicine and Health Technologies and Director of the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at Technical University of Munich. She is a medical doctor with degrees in philosophy and sociology.
Her research spans the whole field of biomedical and public health ethics and questions of solidarity and justice. In addition to research and teaching, Professor Buyx is active in the political and regulatory aspects of biomedical ethics, sitting on several high-level national and international ethics bodies concerned with policy development and implementation. She was a member of the German Ethics Council from 2016 to 2024 and chaired it from 2020 to 2024. Since April 2024, she serves as a member of the German Federal Government's Expert Council on Health and Resilience.

Photo © TUM/Lara Freiburger

Photo © Stimmkreisbüro Judith Gerlach/Susie Knoll

Nils Krüger received his MD from LMU Munich. He is a resident in cardiology at the German Heart Center Munich under Heribert Schunkert and is pursuing his postdoctoral training in pharmacoepidemiology at the Harvard Medical School with Sebastian Schneeweiss. Combining his research interests in both cardiovascular disease and causal interference, Nils is developing analytical methods to study the comparative effectiveness and safety of biopharmaceutical products using complex longitudinal healthcare databases. Nils holds a honors degree in Technology Management from the Center of Digital Technology and Management, a joint institution of LMU Munich and TUM.

Lars Maegdefessel studied medicine at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Upon completion of his medical studies and finalizing his doctorate, he became a Clinical fellow in Cardiology and Vascular Medicine in Mainz, before moving to Stanford University as a Postdoctoral research fellow. In 2012 he was recruited as an Assistant Professor in Experimental Vascular Medicine to the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden. In 2016 he started having a dual affiliation between Stockholm and the Technical University in Munich (TUM), Germany, where he has recently been promoted to become the Director of the newly formed Institute of Molecular Vascular Medicine at TUM. Research in Dr. Maegdefessel’s laboratories in Munich and Stockholm focuses on the therapeutic and biomarker potential of non-coding RNAs in vascular diseases. The two main vascular diseases he is interested in are abdominal aortic aneurysms as well as carotid artery disease and ischemic forms of stroke. The labs have access to various human biobanks and cohorts, in vivo and in vitro models (organs-on-chips) and utilize multiple Omics approaches to unravel novel molecular targets with relevance to vascular disease development and progression. Dr. Maegdefessel has been awarded research grants and awards from the European Research Council (Starting and Consolidator), the German Research and Swedish Research Councils (DFG and Vetenkapsradet), the German Ministry of Education and Research, the Swedish Heart and Lung Foundation, the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), the National Institute of Health (NIH), as well as the American Heart Association (Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in 2010). He leads one DigiMed Bayern subproject on personalized medicine approaches for patients with carotid artery diseases and stroke.

Lara Marie Reimer is a post-doctoral researcher and research group leader at the University Hospital Bonn (formerly Technical University of Munich, School for Computation, Information and Technology (TUM CIT)) in the field of digital medicine. She studied Information Systems at TUM and continued with a doctorate in Digital Health (also at TUM), which she finalized in 2022. Since 2023, she is leading a BMBF Junior Research Group at the Institute for Digital Medicine at the University Hospital Bonn. Her research focuses on the development of mobile solutions for the development of digital biomarkers for early disease detection and monitoring, especially in the fields of neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases. As part of DigiMed Bayern, she is responsible for the technical aspects of the development and scientific evaluation of the HerzFit app together with Fabian Starnecker. Since its release in April 2022, HerzFit was downloaded over 130.000 and more than 4000 HerzFit users donated their data for cardiovascular research.

Daniel Rueckert is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI in Medicine and Healthcare at the Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich, where he is also Director of the Institute for AI and Informatics in Medicine. He is also a Professor of Visual Information Processing in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. As part of his research activities, he has published over 500 journal and conference articles with over 95,000 citations (h-index 133), graduated over 50 PhD students and supervised and mentored over 40 post-docs. Currently, he is a senior member of the editorial board of Medical Image Analysis, and has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Pattern and Machine Intelligence and Image and Vision Computing and as a referee for several international journals and conferences in the area of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Medical Imaging. He has been elected as Fellow of the MICCAI Society (2014), Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2015), Fellow of the IEEE (2015), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2019), Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems ELLIS (2021) and Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2021). More recently, he was elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2023).
www.professoren.tum.de/en/rueckert-daniel
https://aim-lab.io/

Dr. Veronika Sanin,  cardiologist,  lipidologist, and preventive medicine specialist in the lipid clinic at the German Heart Center since 2014. Additionally, she is the principal leader of the VRONI study (screening for early detection of familial hypercholesterolemia). Her research focuses on lipidology and familial hypercholesterolemia. www.myvroni.de

Moritz von Scheidt is a clinician scientist and cardiologist at the German Heart Center Munich of the Technical University of Munich. As a research fellow at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) he studied atherosclerosis in genetically engineered mouse models in direct comparison to human coronary artery disease supervised by Prof. Jake Lusis. He received an excellence grant from the German Centre of Cardiovascular Research (DZHK), third party funding by the German Society of Cardiology (DGK) and the German Heart Foundation (Deutsche Herzstiftung e.V.). In 2021 he received a young investigator award by the Leducq foundation and was awarded with the Uta and Jürgen Breunig Research Price for the mechanistic identification of the transcription factor MAFF as an inflammatory dependent regulator of the LDL-receptor. In 2022 he started his own Junior Research Group studying somatic mutations in cardiovascular disease funded with 1.0 million Euro by the CORONA Foundation. He is initiator and head of the MunIch CardiovaScular StudIes biObaNk (MISSION) – one of the largest human cardiovascular tissue biobanks with access to human coronary samples. His research aim includes the translation from genetics into functional biology, including the identification of biomarkers and potential treatment strategies. 

Heribert Schunkert, MD is Professor of Cardiology of the Technische Universität München and Director of the Cardiology Department, German Heart Centre Munich since 2012. He completed a research fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, USA and clinical fellowships at Beth Israel Hospital, the Universitätsklinika Aachen and Regensburg, and the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA, before he became assistant and associate professor in Regensburg. From 2002-2012 Prof. Schunkert was Director of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the University of Luebeck. He conducts research on the molecular genetics of multifactorial cardiovascular disease, coordinated several EU- and BMBF-sponsored projects as well as the European-American Leducq network CADgenomics to identify the genetic roots of myocardial infarction. He served in the boards of directors in the University Hospital Regensburg and currently in the University Hospital Münster. He is the author of more than 900 publications in international journals.

Fabian Starnecker, MD has been working in the Department of Cardiology at the German Heart Center Munich since 2018. He conducts research in the prevention and treatment of coronary artery disease. Within the framework of DigiMed Bavaria, Fabian Starnecker is responsible for the development and scientific evaluation of the HerzFit app.

Jens Wiehler is a Molecular Biologist with background in population genetics (Diploma, CAU Kiel) and protein engineering (PhD, Gene Center of the LMU Munich). In 2001 he joined the bioinformatics company Biomax Informatics AG as Key Account Manager. From 2006 to 2016 at the Eurofins Group, finally as Head of Business Development, he was building up diverse applied genomics service lines to European top 1-3 positions. From 2016 to 2018 as Business Unit Manager, Jens founded and managed a Eurofins-internal startup for consumer genomics.
In 2018, he joined BioM to help setting up the Bavarian flagship research program for P4 medicine, DigiMed Bayern, for which he is since then Managing Director. DigiMed Bayern aims to implement data and digitally driven medicine of the future, exemplified by the widespread disease atherosclerosis. DigiMed Bayern is being funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Health with a total of €24.5 million until the end of 2024. It includes clinical and epidemiological studies with deep multi-omics approaches, the development of the “HerzFit” prevention app with >130.000 downloads so far, and progressive fundamental development of health data IT infrastructure. Jens is also involved in the areas of innovation, biotech clusters, and policy advice. A current central field of activity is contributing to the development of a collaborative Bavarian-based “trusted research environment” in the context of the emerging European Health Data Space, EHDS.