European Statistical Forum - Speakers

Jens-Otto received a diploma in Mathematics in 1993. In 1994 he started his career in Biostatistics at Grünenthal GmbH in Aachen. Here he worked in several therapeutical areas like gynecology and pain. Later on he became a specialist in the Phase 1 area. In 2005 he started to UCB (legacy Schwarz Pharma) as a Project Biostatistician in Phase 1. With the restructuring at UCB in 2008 Jens-Otto became the Head EU Biostatistics supervising Biostatisticians located in Monheim (Germany) and Brussels. Since 2016 he is also the Head of the East Asia Biostatistics of UCB. UCB’s key indications are CNS and immunology. From 2017 to 2019  Jens-Otto was the Head of Statistical Sciences – Bone & New Diseases at UCB Biosciences GmbH. Currently Jens-Otto is holding the position of a SSI Business Operations Excellence Senior Lead at UCB Biosciences GmbH. 

Lisa has over 20 years of experience in the clinical research industry. In her current role, Lisa is responsible for the management of the biostatistics team including the development professional growth, supervision of the quality of deliverables and outputs, as well as the management of processes for biostatistical activities to ensure they are up-to-date and aligned with the business need and regulatory requirements. Lisa’s areas of expertise include DSMB support, submission studies, integrated summaries, writing Statistical Analysis Plans and contributing to Clinical Study Reports. She has worked in a variety of therapeutic areas and has particular expertise in respiratory, cardiovascular, infectious diseases and oncology. She is a committee member of ESF (European Statistical Forum) and is also a member of several associations including PSI (Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry) and EFSPI (European Federation of Statisticians of the Pharmaceutical Industry). Lisa has been a contributing author on scientific articles in cardiology, diabetes and oncology.

After the degree in statistical sciences from the University of Florence (1998), Giacomo stared his career in drug development in Menarini where he was exposed to different therapeutic areas and development phases. In 2007 he moved to Geneva to join Merck Serono, where he led a biostatistical team dedicated to early development in oncology. In 2013 Giacomo joined Grunenthal as global head of Biostatistics. In 2016 he moved to medical device industry in Livanova as Global Head of Data Management and Statistics. In 2020 he joined Daiichi-Sankyo as Head of Biostatistcs and Data Management Europe. Since 2011 he is part of the scientific board of European Statistical Forum; since 2013 he is part of the European Statistical Leader group of EFSPI. His main research interests are in the field of Bayesian statistics, adaptive design and applications of data science techniques to drug development.

Marc Vandemeulebroecke joined Novartis in 2006, coming from Schering AG in Berlin. He has been supporting development programs in early and late phase development across various disease areas (incl. Neuroscience, Gastrointestinal, Parasitology, Cardio-metabolic, Immunology, Transplant and Hepatology) as statistician and pharmacometrician. Currently he is Global Group Head for Dermatology. Marc holds a maîtrise in mathematics from the University Paris XI, a diploma in mathematics from the University of Münster, a PhD in mathematical statistics from the University of Magdeburg, and an MSc in PKPD modeling from the University of Manchester. He received the Gustav-Adolf-Lienert award from the German Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS) for his PhD thesis, which focused on adaptive designs. He co-authored various scientific publications and one R package and is Associate Editor of Pharmaceutical Statistics. Marc’s current interests include statistical graphics and machine learning.

Graeme Archer is VP & Head of the Non-clinical and Translational Statistics (NCTS) group. NCTS ensures integrity in the design, analysis and interpretation of models and experiments developed by GSK R&D’s Research Units – Graeme is particularly focused on ‘translation’ (what do we predict will be observed in man, and how confident in those predictions should we be?) On GSK’s Research governance boards he strives for statistical rigour in portfolio decision-making – and was joint winner of the 2019 Royal Statistical Society’s Pharmaceutical Excellence award for his work on Quantitative Decision-Making. His 1990s PhD, from the University of Glasgow, concerned Bayesian methods for image analysis – early ‘machine learning’? – and as a consequence he is a champion for synergy between the statistical and AI/ML communities. Graeme spent a sabbatical year in 2016 as a speech-writer for a British cabinet minister.

Johann de Jong obtained his PhD in Computational Cancer Biology from Delft University of Technology. Since then, he has gained experience in a wide variety of domains, ranging from gene regulation and chromatin biology to cancer research and neurological disorders, in both academia (the Netherlands Cancer Institute) and industry (BASF, UCB). He currently works as a Principal Scientist at UCB, and develops and applies methods grounded in machine learning (including deep learning) and statistics for the analysis of biological and clinical datasets, within the context of precision medicine.

I studied sports medicine and maths in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) and received my PhD in 2013 working on nonlinear time series analysis. In July 2013 I successfully applied for a position at the Department of Medical Biometry in Heidelberg. As biostatistician I am involved in clinical trials. Additionally, I am responsible for our Master’s programme Medical Biometry/ Biostatistics and set up our certificate programme Medical Data Science in 2018/19. 

• Studies of mathematics at the Ruhr-University Bochum
• Doctoral thesis at the Hannover medical school
• More than 5 years of industry experience
• Senior Principal Statistical Consultant at Novartis

Tom is a data scientist in the data and analytics team at the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). This team provides central oversight, advice and support on all aspects of data and analytics; spearheading the transformation programme to enable more sophisticated collection, management, storage and exploitation of data across NICE to enable better evidence based decisions across all its business.
Tom joined NICE in 2019 following 10 years of working in data science at the University of Manchester.

Dimitrios is co-founder and Executive Director to Intelligencia, a NY based data science company. Intelligencia focuses on making novel therapies available to patients faster, by assessing their probability of success during clinical development. Prior to that, Dimitris was with McKinsey & Co, as a consultant and later as the domain lead for New Ventures in Life Sciences R&D. He has worked with organizations and governments in North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa and SE Asia. He is an advisor and angel investor to technology companies with a focus on big data. Dimitris holds an LLM from UCL, and an MBA from INSEAD, where he currently serves as an Executive in Residence for AI/ Digital.

• Studies of statistics at the LMU Munich
• Doctoral thesis at the Institute for Medical Biometry and Informatics (IMBI), Heidelberg University
• Head of the working group “Statistical Modeling” at the IMBI
• Principal Biostatistician at Novartis

Biography available soon