Panelists

Luiza Dobre, Founder and CEO of Komed Health AG, is based in Zurich and holds dual Master’s Degrees from the University of St. Gallen and ESADE Business School, specializing in International Management and Marketing Management. Additionally, she completed an online Technology Entrepreneurship degree from Stanford University.

Luiza is a recipient of the Swiss Economic Forum Niesen Bergpreis, recognizing her exceptional leadership in developing an integrated healthcare communication platform. This platform empowers healthcare professionals to make quicker, well-informed decisions, ultimately improving patient outcomes. Komed Health’s secure real-time communication platform is an all-in-one healthcare communication hub, seamlessly integrating with existing systems to provide doctors and nurses with actionable, real-time patient data. Presently, it is adopted by esteemed clinics in Switzerland and Germany, with plans for global expansion.

Dedicated to revolutionizing clinical collaboration, Luiza is committed to making a meaningful impact on the lives of patients and healthcare professionals. She actively advocates for collaboration and community engagement, actively seeking like-minded innovators to drive positive change in healthcare and society.

Michael Friebe is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering Innovation at the AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland. He is an inventor of over 80 patents and has authored over 200 papers. He is a Board Member of four medical technology start-up companies and an investment partner of a MedTech fund. From 2016 to 2018, he was an IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer on Innovation Generation and MedTech Entrepreneurship.

He received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering, his M.Sc. degree in technology management from Golden Gate University, San Francisco, and his Ph.D. degree in Medical Physics in Germany. After his B.Sc. degree, he spent five years in San Francisco as a Research and Design Engineer with an MRI and ultrasound device manufacturer. He has significant expertise in diagnostic imaging and image-guided therapies as a Founder/Innovator/CEO/Investor and a Scientist. 

He is also a Research Fellow with the Technical University of Munich, Munich; an Adjunct Professor with the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; and a professor of image-guided therapies with Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany.

Katarzyna Heryan, born in the most beautiful European city – Krakow, is a medical image analysis expert, ML/DL specialist, and enthusiast of introducing novel technologies to healthcare. Author of seven successful international research proposals and leader and principal investigator in each. Holder of two patents on ECG analysis. She is a co-founder of Autosymed and the product owner of CorFlow – a functionality system for the automatic recognition of cardiovascular stenosis. Since 2014 she has been working as a researcher and teacher at AGH University in Cracow. Graduated with a master’s in Computer Science and Medical Electronics at AGH University in Cracow and finished several courses on medical image processing, soft skills, and entrepreneurship in top European locations (ETH Zurich, Lund Univerity, Masaryk University in Brno). In private life, a mother of lovely two-year-old twins – Wiktoria and Gustaw.

Nektarios Tavernarakis is a distinguished Professor of Molecular Systems Biology at the Medical School of the University of Crete, in Heraklion, Greece. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), the largest Research Institution in Greece. He has served as Director of FORTH’s Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB), where he heads the Neurogenetics and Aging laboratory. He is the Director of the Graduate Program on BioInformatics at the Medical School of the University of Crete. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Crete, and trained as a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA. His work focuses on the molecular mechanisms of necrotic cell death and neurodegeneration, the interplay between cellular metabolism and aging, the mechanisms of sensory transduction and integration by the nervous system, and the development of novel genetic tools for biomedical research.

He is Chairman of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Governing Board and Executive Committee. He has been elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Academia Europaea, and corresponding member of the Academy of Athens. He has received several notable scientific prizes and awards, including two ERC Advanced Investigator Grants and an innovation-supporting ERC Proof of Concept Grant.

He is also the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, the Helmholtz International Fellow Award, the EMBO Young Investigator Award, the Galien Scientific Research Award, the BioMedical Research Award of the Academy of Athens, the Bodossaki Foundation Scientific Prize for Medicine and Biology, and the Empeirikeion Foundation Academic Excellence Prize.

Professor Nektarios Tavernarakis is Vice-President of the European Research Council since 01 Jan 2021 and is responsible for the Life Sciences domain.