We are pleased to announce our keynote speakers for the Informatics for Health 2017 conference.

Riccardo Bellazzi

Professor of Bioengineering and Biomedical Informatics, University of Pavia, Italy
Riccardo Bellazzi is Full Professor of Bioengineering and Biomedical Informatics at the
Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering of the University of Pavia. He is the Director of the Laboratory of Medical Informatics “Mario Stefanelli” and the chair of the PhD program of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, University of Pavia. Moreover, he leads Laboratory of Biomedical Informatics at the hospital “Salvatore Maugeri” in Pavia. Last year he also became the Chair of the Interdepartmental Centre for Health Technologies (CHT) of the University of Pavia.

Professor Bellazzi has a wide and internationally recognised research activity. His scientific interests are highly interdisciplinary and are aimed at applications of informatics to medicine and life sciences, comprising data mining, temporal data analysis, decision support, clinical research informatics. In 2009 he became a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), and he was Vice-President of IMIA in the period 2011-2014.

Finally, he is co-founder of the academic spin-off Biomeris, which implements software to support clinical research and Engenome, which is specialised on the analysis of Next
Generation Sequencing data.

Frank van Harmelen

Professor of Knowledge Representation & Reasoning, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University Amsterdam. He is one of the co-designers of the W3C ontology representation language OWL, and was involved in the design of Sesame, one of the most widely used RDF repositories world wide. He is co-author of the Semantic Web Primer, the first textbook on Semantic Web technologies, now translated into 5 languages. He was scientific director of the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC), which aimed to build a platform for very large scale distributed reasoning. Besides research into the fundamental questions such as inconsistency, scalability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity, he is also involved in a wide variety of applications of semantic technologies, among others in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, scientific publishing and e-science. His work on the Sesame triplestore received the 10 year impact award of the International Semantic Web Conference, and he was elected member of the European Academy of Science in 2014.

Susan Michie

Professor of Health Psychology, University College London, UK
Susan Michie is Professor of Health Psychology at University College London, UK. She studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London University and a DPhil in Developmental Psychology. She is a chartered clinical and health psychologist, and elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the US Society of Behavioural Medicine, the US Academy of Behavioural Medicine Research, the European Health Psychology Society and the British Psychological Society.

Professor Michie is Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change and of the Health Psychology Research Group at UCL. She leads an extensive programme of research developing the science of behaviour change interventions and applying that science to intervention development and evaluation. Areas of application focus on prevention of ill health and implementation of evidence-based practice. Methodological projects include the Wellcome Trust-funded Human Behaviour-Change Project and the MRC-funded Theory and Techniques project.

Sally Okun

Vice President for Advocacy, Policy and Patient Safety, PatientsLikeMe
Sally Okun is Vice President for Advocacy, Policy and Patient Safety at PatientsLikeMe, an online patient powered research network. She is responsible for bringing patient voice and insight to diverse advocacy and policy discussions at national and global levels, and is the company’s liaison with government and regulatory agencies. Sally joined the company in 2008 as the Manager of Health Data Integrity and Patient Safety overseeing the medical ontology and development of the Drug Safety Platform. She is a member of numerous advisory and expert panels. Sally, an RN palliative care specialist, received her Master’s degree from The Heller School for Social Policy & Management, was a fellow at NLM Program in Biomedical Informatics and a Salzburg Global Fellow.