Keynote speakers
Professor Elaine Mardis, PhD
Co-Executive Director, Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital
Elaine Mardis, PhD is co-Executive Director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and holds the Rasmussen Nationwide Foundation Endowed Chair in Genomic Medicine. She also is Professor of Paediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
Dr. Mardis was previously on faculty at Washington University School of Medicine for 22 years, where she was named the Robert E. and Louise F. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Medicine. Dr. Mardis serves on the Supervisory Board of Qiagen N.V. and on the Board of Directors of Singular Genomics Systems, Inc.
She is an internationally recognized expert in cancer genomics and immunogenomics, with over 430 published manuscripts. Her ongoing research interests lie in the integrated characterization of cancer genomes, defining DNA-based somatic and germline interactions and RNA-based pathways and immune microenvironments that lead to cancer onset and progression, with a focus on paediatric cancers and precision oncology.
Dr. Mardis is the former President of the American Association for Cancer Research. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
Professor Neil Sebire
Professor of Pathology GOSH UCL and Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO)
Director of the GOSH Clinical Informatics Research Programme
Neil Sebire is Professor of pathology at Great Ormond Street Hospital Institute of child health. He is an active clinical academic, having co-authored >1000 publications (h-index 108), with a particular interest over recent years in clinical informatics and making secondary use of routine health data.
He is the chief research information officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital and was the inaugural national chief clinical data officer for health data research UK (HDRUK). He runs the GOSH clinical informatics research program which currently has more than 20 PhD students working in this area.
Professor Gary L. Freed MD, MPH
Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics
Professor of Health Management and Policy
Director, Program on Equity for Adolescent and Child Health (PEACH)
Director, Michigan Child Health Equity Collaborative (MI-CHEC)
Gary L. Freed MD, MPH is the Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and Professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He serves as Associate Chair for Government Relations in the Department of Pediatrics and the Directory of Research for the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion in the Medical School.
Dr. Freed has more than 30 years of experience in children’s health services research. He founded the first pediatric health services research center in the US and directed the first NIH-funded pediatric health services research fellowship in the nation. He has been the principal investigator of numerous grants on child health policy and health economics, immunizations, health care quality measurement, health inequities, physician behavior and the medical workforce.
He is a past president of the Society for Pediatric Research, the largest research society in child health. He is past chair of the Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Advisory Committee and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. He recently completed his term as the President of the International Pediatric Research Foundation, an organization comprised of the leading pediatric research societies in the US and Europe. His research outside of the US has included health policy and economic studies in both western and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel, Japan and Australia. He just completed work as a 2021-22 Fulbright Scholar to The Netherlands where he conducted foundational research into the health care delivery for children and worked to develop the field of pediatric HSR in that country.
He spent 3 years in Australia as a visiting scholar at the Royal Children’s Hospital and as a Professor in the School of Population and Global Health. While at the RCH he started the health services research program.
In 2023 he founded the Program for Equity and Child Health (PEACH) and the Michigan Child Health Equity Collaborative (Mi-CHEC), the first quality collaborative in the US focused on child health equity.
Adjunct Professor Jean-Frédéric Levesque, MD PHD FRCP
Deputy Secretary Clinical Innovation and Research
Chief Executive Agency for Clinical Innovation at NSW Health
Dr Jean-Frédéric Levesque is the Deputy Secretary, Clinical Innovation and Research and Chief
Executive, Agency for Clinical Innovation at NSW Health.
He is an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity at the University of New
South Wales. He has authored more than 150 peer reviewed publications and his seminal research
on healthcare access and inequity has been cited more than 2,000 times.
Jean-Frédéric Levesque has a Medical Degree, a Masters in Community Health and a Doctorate in
Public Health from the Université de Montréal, Canada. He brings extensive leadership in healthcare
systems analysis and improvement, combining experience in clinical practice in refugee health and tropical medicine, in clinical governance and in academic research.