Diego serves as a consultant rheumatologist at Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge in Barcelona and as an assistant professor at the Universidad de Barcelona. Additionally, he collaborates as a Senior Medical Advisor at Savana, a company focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine. Beyond his involvement in healthcare technology, particularly AI, his primary interests include spondyloarthritis, patient-reported outcomes, and musculoskeletal epidemiology. Diego is the Chair-elect of EMEUNET.

E-mail: diegobenavent@bellvitgehospital.cat

Vanessa Bartsch is a resident in rheumatology at Nuremberg Hospital. She has a particular interest in health services research and the implementation of digital solutions in rheumatology. At the “Digital Rheumatology Days,” she will speak about the current state of digitalization in rheumatology worldwide.

Loreto Carmona is a rheumatologist and clinical epidemiologist from Spain with a cross-sectional interest in research methodology and patient-centred healthcare. Throughout her career, she has participated in more than 100 studies on diverse diseases with interdisciplinary, multicultural teams. This, along with her confrontation with methodological challenges, has given her a broad perspective on the field. Since 2020, her primary focus has been on implementation and communication, always grounded in equity. She loves working with teams as a bridge from knowledge to daily life.

Okan Ekinci is SVP & Global Head of Marketing & Innovation for Roche Information Solutions (Santa Clara, CA, USA). Roche delivers digital health solutions that empower healthcare professionals and patients to make insights-based decisions and personalize healthcare.

With his team, Okan redefines the way digital health products are designed, validated, implemented, and marketed. He serves on the steering board of the StarfinderLab AI innovation program and the global healthcare accelerator Startup Creasphere.

Okan joined Roche in 2018 to build and lead the new Medical & Scientific Affairs function for digital products. Before joining Roche, he was Global Head of Healthcare Consulting at Siemens Healthineers, developing and offering IT-enabled transformation and clinical consulting services. Prior to that, he established the Global Medical Office of Healthineers and served as its first CMO. Okan spent eight out of his 20+ years of experience in the healthcare sector in clinical practice in cardiology. 

Okan holds an MBA from the European School of Management and Technology, Berlin, an MD from the University of Mainz, Germany, and is adjunct professor of medicine at the University College Dublin, Ireland. 

Adam Flynn, MD is an American physician living and working in Germany since 2014.   He is board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine and has the German recognition as Facharzt für Innere Medizin.   In addition to currently practicing both outpatient and inpatient medicine,  he serves as Chief Medical Technology Officer for AIRAdoc, where he brings his broad experiences to bear on the task of using technology to improve medical care. 

Gregor Holak, MD is a senior consultant in Internal Medicine at Klinik Ottakring, where he serves as Head of the Rheumatology Outpatient Clinic within the 5th Department of Medicine. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine with additional specialist qualifications in Rheumatology as well as Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases.

Dr. Holak received his medical degree from Medical University of Vienna in 1999 and completed postgraduate training across several major Austrian institutions, including General Hospital Feldkirch, UKH Lorenz Böhler, and Wilhelminen Hospital (now Klinik Ottakring). He has also completed clinical training at  Wollongong Hospital/New South Wales (AUS).

Since 2017, he has led the rheumatology service at Klinik Ottakring, with a clinical focus on inflammatory rheumatic diseases, metabolic bone disorders, osteoporosis, diabetes, and interdisciplinary internal medicine. He also holds a diploma in emergency medicine and has advanced expertise in musculoskeletal ultrasound.

Dr. Holak is an experienced national speaker in Internal Medicine, Rheumatology, Diabetology, and Osteology, and is a regular author of medical review articles and educational publications. His recent work has addressed topics such as Janus kinase inhibitors, chondrocalcinosis, and sarcoidosis.

Matthieu is a leader in life sciences innovation and AI implementation, currently heading the healthcare digital & AI venture at Nautilus·ai by Alcimed in the US. In this role, he builds and scales data-driven solutions for global pharmaceutical, biotech, and medtech companies, helping translate advanced analytics, machine learning, and software into tangible business and clinical impact.

Alongside his work in consulting, Matthieu is the founder of an AgriTech startup, TacoTech, focused on improving industrial connectivity through IoT technologies and enabling life sciences organizations of all sizes easily become data-driven. His experience spans the full spectrum from strategy to execution, bridging data science, product development, and real-world deployment in complex, regulated environments.

Matthieu has led dozens of AI and data projects for leading life sciences organizations, working at the intersection of innovation, digital transformation, and operational performance. His work emphasizes turning emerging technologies into scalable, value-generating solutions.

He is an alumnus of Ecole Centrale Paris and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is currently based in New York, United States.”

Rachel Knevel is associate professor at the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC, the Netherlands) leading the data science group in rheumatology, she has a proven record of integrating high-quality patient care, innovative research, and academic leadership. She earned her MD and PhD in Genetics from Leiden University and further honed her expertise during a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She has pioneered approaches for early disease diagnosis using AI and genetics and leads major international collaborative projects that translate research into scalable diagnostic tools. In addition, she serves as Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) at Leiden University Medical Center, where she provides strategic leadership at the intersection of research, data, and AI. She actively mentors and teaches the next generation of clinicians and researchers. Her work focuses on improving patient outcomes and advances the field of rheumatology.

Professor Uta Kiltz holds the Chair of Health Services Research in Rheumatology at Ruhr University Bochum. She heads the outpatient clinic and registry at the Rheumatology Center of the Ruhr Region. Her research interests focus on spondyloarthritis and health services research. She has conducted research on aspects of outcome research, digital rheumatology, and quality standards. For more than 10 years, she has coordinated the development and updating of the national guidelines for axial spondyloarthritis and gout in Germany.

Saverio La Bella, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

I am a paediatric rheumatologist and PhD student at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milano, Italy) working for PRINTO (the Paediatric Rheumatology International Trials Organisation). I am an active member of both PReS-EMERGE (Paediatric Rheumatology European Society early-career group) and EMEUNET (the EULAR researchers early-career group). Currently, my main occupations are the new JIA classification criteria (for PRINTO/PRCSG) and the systematic literature review with Vincenzo Venerito for the upcoming EULAR recommendations on AI and Big Data.

Fabian Lechner is Head of the Central Artificial Intelligence Department (ZD KI) at AGAPLESION gAG, a major healthcare group in Germany. In this role, he is responsible for the strategic development, coordination, and organizational integration of AI initiatives within the group.
The Central AI Department is responsible for the substantive and structural development of AI activities, including coordination with internal departments and external providers.
In parallel with his work at AGAPLESION, Fabian Lechner is pursuing a doctoral degree in medical informatics. He is affiliated as a PhD student at Philipps University of Marburg (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science); his dissertation is publication-based and not yet completed.

Alfredo Madrid-García holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and is a data scientist working at Roche (Madrid, Spain), where he applies large language model (LLM) solutions for clinical and scientific workflows. He previously conducted seven years of research at the Rheumatology Department of Hospital Clínico San Carlos (Madrid), focusing on natural language processing and real-world clinical data, including information extraction from electronic health records. As an independent researcher, his current interests include LLM agents, retrieval-augmented generation, and broader applications of generative AI in rheumatology.

PD Dr. Harriet Morf is an internist, sports Medicine specialist, current rheumatology fellow, and the head of the “Digital Medicine and Health Services Research” workgroup at University Hospital Erlangen. Dr. Morf is a pioneer in integrating digital technologies—such as therapeutic apps and sensor-based movement analysis—into clinical care. Her passion is digital movement therapy, especially in patients with rheuamtic diseases.

Mikhail Protopopov is a clinical researcher and rheumatologist at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His work centers on axial spondyloarthritis, particularly the integration of artificial intelligence into imaging analysis. He is a full member of the Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society (ASAS) and was a Young ASAS Leader from 2023 to 2025.

Koray Tascilar is a physician-scientist at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen Department of Medicine III Rheumatology and Immunology, where he works full-time in clinical research as an applied methodologist. Trained in rheumatology, his research spans inflammatory and immune-mediated diseases, translational medicine, imaging, quantitative methods, and outcomes research. He has contributed to a broad range of collaborative projects, including phase I-III drug studies, biomarker research, imaging applications, functional assessment, epidemiology, and machine learning. His work in rheumatology, immunology, and related fields is particularly concerned with the use of clinical and imaging data to characterize cohorts and study rheumatic disease course course over time.

Prof. Jean Louis Raisaro is Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Informatics at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne, holds a PhD in Computer Science from EPFL, and is Head of Clinical Data Science at the Biomedical Data Science Center of CHUV. He leads a group developing innovative AI and data science solutions to improve clinical care and support multicenter research. His work spans trustworthy AI, privacy-preserving methods, clinical large language models and agentic systems, as well as multimodal foundation models that integrate diverse clinical data sources. He also leads the development of platforms for safe, ethical, and regulatory-ready AI deployment, and has contributed to impactful solutions at CHUV such as an AI-enabled Sepsis Learning Health System and Meditron-CHUV, an open-source medical LLM aligned with clinician preferences.

Anne Therese Tveter, Physiotherapist and senior researcher at Diakonhjemmet Hospital, Health service research and innovation unit. I am vice director of the REMEDY center, a clinical research center for treatment in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases. I am also professor at Oslo Metropolitan University.

Dr. Markus Vogel, MD, MBA, is Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) at Microsoft Health & Life Sciences DACH and a board-certified pediatrician with clinical experience in neonatology, pediatric intensive care, and infectious diseases in Germany and internationally. In his work with hospitals, he highlights a persistent barrier to clinical AI adoption: fragmented, siloed IT that forces clinicians into duplicate documentation, separate logins, and broken workflows. Markus advocates for turning “airplane mode” off by building secure, interoperable platforms with role-based access, digital identity, and an ecosystem approach, so clinical Copilots and agentic AI assistants can deliver sustainable value at the bedside.

Professor Bart van den Bemt is clinical pharmacist, clinical pharmacologist and senior clinical scientist at the departments of Pharmacy in the Sint Maartenskliniek and the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Bart is medical manager of the in- and outpatient pharmacy of the Sint Maartenskliniek and head of Research and Innovation of the same hospital.

Due to his professional experiences as community-, clinical-, outpatient- and formula-pharmacist Bart has extensive experience of pharmacy practice, the development of (digital) pharmaceutical care programs and development of educational programs. Bart also founded a new Dutch bachelor course Pharmaceutical Consultant and is member of several committees/boards on pharmacotherapy, education, pharmaceutical care and outpatient pharmacy. Bart was president of the European Society of Clinical Pharmacy and vice-president of the Dutch Association of Hospital Pharmacy..

Bart’s research interests are focused on Personalized Pharmaceutical Care including medication adherence, e-health, medication review, therapeutic drug monitoring of biologicals, inflammatory pain, transitional care and medication wastage.

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