B.F. Francis Ouellette is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto, as well as the Scientific Coordinator for the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop series. Before that, Francis was the Associate Director of the Informatics and Biocomputing platform and a senior scientist at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) in Toronto, Ontario. Before his move to Toronto in 2007, Francis was an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at UBC, and Director of the UBC Bioinformatics Centre (UBiC) at the Michael Smith Laboratories. Francis was trained at McGill University (undergraduate and graduate studies), as well as the University of Calgary, McGill University and Simon Fraser University (graduate studies). After working on the yeast genome sequencing project at McGill University, he took a position at the NCBI as GenBank coordinator from 1993 to 1998. His work at the OICR involved bioinformatics training, as well as biocuration and management of cancer genomic data. Since his work at the NIH, coordinating the largest Open DNA sequence database in the World (GenBank), Francis has been dedicated to ensuring openness of Science: the data it generates, and the publications that report them. Not only through his work, but on the various advisory boards and editorial boards he serves on: PLOS Computational Biology Education Editor; Associate Editor for DATABASE, an OUP Open Access journal; a number of NIH-funded Open Source and Open Data resource projects: The Saccharomyces Genome Database SAB member, the Galaxy Project SAB member, The GenomeSpace advisory member; the Human Microbiome Project advisory member. Francis is also on the Elixir-Europe SAB as well as the current Chair of the H3ABioNet SAB.

Professor Ramsay is Director of the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) and Professor in the Division of Human Genetics, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg. Her research interests include African population genetic diversity and their role in diseases exacerbated by adverse lifestyle choices, including obesity and cardiometabolic diseases; and rare monogenic eye and skin disorders (including albinism and keratolytic winter erythema). She is joint-PI for the Southern African Human Genome Programme with a view to exploring precision medicine in an African context. As an active steering committee member of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Consortium, she promotes capacity development for genomic research in Africa. She is Principal Investigator of an NIH funded Collaborative Centre under the H3Africa Consortium for “Genomic and environmental risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases in Africans” – a Wits INDEPTH partnership. In addition, she holds a South African Research Chair on Genomics and Bioinformatics of African populations and is President of the African Society for Human Genetics.

Dr. Marylyn D. Ritchie is a Professor (tenured) of Genetics and Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She is also Associate Director of the Penn Center for Precision Medicine, Director of the Center for Translational Bioinformatics, and Co-Director of the Penn Medicine BioBank. Dr. Ritchie is an expert in translational bioinformatics, with a focus on developing, applying, and disseminating algorithms, methods, and tools integrating electronic health records (EHR) with genomics. Dr. Ritchie has over 20 years of experience in translational bioinformatics and has authored over 375 publications (H-index 87). Dr. Ritchie was appointed as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) in 2020. Dr. Ritchie was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2021; she is being recognized “for paradigm-changing research demonstrating the utility of electronic health records for identifying clinical diseases or phenotypes that can be integrated with genomic data from biobanks for genomic medicine discovery and implementation science.” Dr. Ritchie holds a PhD from Vanderbilt University in Statistical Genetics, an M.S. from Vanderbilt University in Applied Statistics, and a B.S. in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Dr. Ritchie is also the host of two podcasts: she co-hosts The Biomedical Informatics Roundtable podcast with Dr. Jason Moore and she is the solo host of The CALM Podcast: Combining Academia and Life with Marylyn.

Janet Kelso is head of the Bioinformatics research group at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on comparative primate genomics and ancient DNA with a particular emphasis on analysis of the genomes of archaic humans. Her group has a special interest in the development of novel software for processing and analysis of high-throughput sequence data and uses computational approaches to gain insights into genome evolution. Janet received her PhD in bioinformatics from the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape under the supervision of Professor Winston Hide developing an ontology for classifying gene expression data for which she won the L'Oreal women in science fellowship. She is author of more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Together with Alfonso Valencia, Janet is the co-Editor-in-chief of the journal Bioinformatics, and also an editor of the journal Database. Janet is an active member of the Board of the International Society of Computational Biology. She has held positions as both Vice-president and Secretary, and was named a Fellow of the society in 2015.

William Hersh, MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. Dr. Hersh is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics both in education and research. In education, he is Director of OHSU’s Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, which is one of the oldest and largest in the world, and offers Master’s and PhD degrees as well as a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Informatics. In research, his work has mostly focused on information retrieval (also known as search), where he has authored over 200 scientific papers and abstracts as well as the book, Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Springer, 2009), now in its third edition. For more information see: http://www.billhersh.info, https://informaticsprofessor.blogspot.com/ Twitter: @williamhersh

Odile Ouwe Missi Oukem-Boyer is a French senior scientist. She hold a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in cellular biology and immunology from University of Aix-Marseille, France; a DEA in advanced immunology from University of Paris/Institut Pasteur and a PhD in life and health science from University of Lille, France. During and after her PhD, she spent few years as a lecturer in biology and chemistry in private schools in France. Since then, she has permanently worked in health research institutions in West and Central Africa. During the last 20 years spent in Africa, her career path has progressively evolved from primary researcher to deputy administrator, scientific director and director general in various African research centers in Gabon, Cameroon, Niger and Mali. Her main research interests are tropical infectious diseases (tropical neglected diseases such as schistosomiasis, human African trypanosomiasis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, meningitis, etc.), clinical trials, bioinformatics and health research ethics. Through research, she has developed South-South collaborations and promoted networking activities. Moreover, she has devoted time and efforts to public health (meningitis, cholera, diphtheria, Ebola, etc.) education and training, and to capacity building, particularly in the fields of clinical trials, good clinical and laboratory practices, bioinformatics and ethics. As far as ethics is concerned, she has been involved in various activities, among which the implementation of the institutional Review Board of the Chantal Biya International Research Centre in Cameroon, which she administered for 4 years (2007-2010). She has been the vice-president of the Cameroon Bioethics Initiative (CAMBIN) from 2009 to 2017, and has become the chair of CAMBIN in 2018. She is member of 3 ethics committees in Central Africa. She has been an active member of the Human Heredity and Health Africa ethics and regulatory working group from 2013 to 2016. Besides her scientific background, she has significant experience in administration, board of director and scientific council meetings, coordination of research program and projects, project management, relations with foundations and research funding agencies, diplomacy, institutional communication, and human resources management and evaluation. Moreover, she has always been working in a multicultural environment. As a manager during the past 12 years, she has headed research institutions with 30 to 50 staff in Cameroon, Niger, and Mali, and managed annual budgets of over 2000 K€. She has built relationships with governments, policy-makers, and with many technical and financial partners involved in the health sector on the continent, including bilateral cooperation organizations. In Niger, she was affiliated to the International Network of Pasteur Institutes and therefore developed contacts all over the world and increased her international visibility. Since 2016, she has been working for Fondation Mérieux where she holds a position of country representative (Mali and Niger). Since 2018, she is simultaneously the acting Director General at the Centre d’Infectiologie Charles Mérieux du Mali.