Erik earned his Bachelor of Science in Analytical Chemistry at the Saxion Hoges­chool in Deventer, Netherlands and completed Foundations of Management at the Nyenrode Business University in Breukelen, Netherlands. Since 1998 he chaired several Conference Program Committees related to Laboratory Automation and Informatics, participated in Organizing Committees around Food Safety, Animal Healthcare and Water Management and was a member of the editorial advisory board of Laboratory Magazine. Erik Steinfelder had various commercial roles in La­bautomation companies and contract laboratories before he joined Thermo Fisher Scientific. Currently he is heading the complete biobank portfolio and activities for Thermo Fisher Scientific as the Biobank Commercial Leader in EMEA and APAC. Within ESBB Erik is the Past President, Founding member, Chair of the Vendor Com­mittee 2013-2015 and Program Committee Member 2012-2017.

Dr. Dejun Tang is Global Head of Biostatistics and Clinical Submission Management at Sandoz, a Novartis Division. Pharma China, which includes Biostatistics, Sta­tistical Programming, Data Management, Medical Writing, and Clinical Submission Management functions. During his 20 years of tenure in biopharmaceutical and healthcare industry, Dr. Tang has led the biostatistics and other function teams supporting all phases of clinical trials in drug development and achieved regulatory approvals in over 70 countries. He has extensive experience on interactions with health authorities in Europe, North America, and Asia. Dr. Tang received his Ph.D. in statistics from Purdue University, Indiana, USA. He is an adjunct professor in the School of Statistics and Management at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in China. He has taught credit courses in biostatistics and clinical trials for MS and Ph.D. students. His current research interests are in clinical trial design, Bayesian methods, modeling and simulation, multiregional clinical trials, and big data implications. Dr. Tang has actively participated in statistical society activities globally. He is currently the chair of the International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Shanghai Committee and the Board of Director for ICSA, which is the fourth largest statistical organization based in the US.

Dr Brian Lockhart is currently the Director of the Division of Biotechnology Bio­marker Research at Servier Laboratories France. This division focuses on target hy­pothesis validation as well as biomarker development and application in preclinical and early clinical development, by employing Genomic, Proteomic, Bioinformatics and Molecular Histopathology technologies for cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative pathologies. Dr. Brian Lockhart has a degree in Biochemistry, Trinity College Dublin (1981-1985) and a Ph.D., Biochemistry Department, Trin­ity College Dublin (1986-1989). Dr. Lockhart has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles and reviews and co-inventor in over 8 patents.

Dr. Chen has over 20 years of experience working in a variety of clinical research settings, mainly within the pharmaceutical industries, including CROs (contract research organizations). Her main therapeutic expertise includes oncology and cardiovascular; is experienced in complex survival models and adaptive design considerations. She is an active contributor and reviewer for the Journal of Biophar­maceutical Statistics and Statistics in Medicine. At PAREXEL International, Dr. Chen is heading the Biostatistics Center of Excellence for adaptive clinical trial designs where the availability of biomarkers has a strong influence on innovative designs of clinical studies. Dr. Chen holds a MD degree from Sun Yat-Sen University of Medical Sciences, China. She obtained her MS degree in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and her PhD degree in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, USA.

Dr. Hernandez-Fuentes studied Medicine in Universidad Complutense and then did a PhD in Immunology in Universidad de Alcalá, both in Madrid, Spain. In 1998 she moved to the UK to do a post-doc at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London, working on alloimmune responses. In 2005 the research group moved to King’s College London and she started leading the Biomarker research group of the MRC Centre for Transplantation. From 2011 - 2016 she has been Senior Lecturer in Translational Research at KCL. Late in 2016 she moved to UCB Pharma to do translation in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Hernandez-Fuentes has a long stand­ing interest in understanding and quantifying alloimune responses and immune monitoring to better predict and understand outcomes in transplantation. The Bio­marker Research Team aimed to translate into the clinic Biomarkers that could be predictive of kidney transplant outcome and could eventually enable biomarker-led individualization of therapy. Within the team Genome Wide Association scans, gene expression and a number immune-monitoring techniques have been used. During this time, Dr. Hernandez-Fuentes has developed an expertise in biobanking and sample collection for patient benefit, underpinning the full translational pathway of biomarker knowledge.

Ben Turner is the Director of Bioinformatics Consulting at QIAGEN. He joined QIA­GEN four years ago along with the acquisition of CLC bio. At CLC bio, Ben held mul­tiple leadership roles in the commercial and consulting organization with a strong focus on NGS informatics. Prior to CLC bio, Ben was the European Informatics and Software specialist as part of the field applications support team of Applied Biosystem/Life Technologies for nine years. His current passion and focus is helping clients obtain maximum insights and value from their sequencing data by leverag­ing enterprise-level bioinformatics platforms and service solutions towards their various applications.

Dr. Nicola Orlandi is currently the Head of Data Privacy in Novartis. He is partnering with divisional business to enable growth, productivity and innovation, implement­ing privacy controls and considering data privacy requirements as well as business needs. Dr. Orlandi major accountabilities are to build scientific and business exper­tise in area of division in order to fully understand data privacy related business needs, to assess business strategy and projects as well as project proposals with regard to arising data privacy challenges and provide associated legal counselling.

Barbara Baert is the Flex Laboratory Manager within the CPU and the Global Clini­cal Pharmacology Department at Janssen R&D. In this role, she provides support in the biomarker processing and analysis activities in exploratory FIH HV and pa­tient studies. She has overall responsibility for all laboratory-related procedures and tasks, and supervises and theFlex Laboratory team of the CPU. Barbara has started in 2009 at the Clinical Pharmacology Unit as the Laboratory Manager of the local processing lab supporting the FIH HV study execution. In the following years she became responsible for the implementation of more complex, exploratory sample processing activities in support of the different therapeutic areas, the evolution in quality and innovation of the flex laboratory and improving the visibility of the unit to her colleagues within J&J. She received a degree in Biology in 2001 and a mas­ter’s in Biochemistry in 2003 from the University of Antwerp, before gaining a PhD in Applied Bio-Engineering Sciences in Microbiology at the VUB MINT group in Brus­sels. Her interests are focusing on clinical trials, biomarker science and processing, analysis and complex sample processing.

Elke Smits earned her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Leuven, a Master of Science in Biotechnology and a PhD in Veterinary Sciences in 1998 from the University of Gent in Belgium. Elke Smits joined Devgen Inc, as manager molecular cell biology for target discovery and drug development projects. In 2004, she became senior scientist at the Flemish Science Policy Council. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, holds several patents, wrote many policy advices and recommendations and authored the study series Technology and Inno­vation in Flanders: Priorities. Prof. dr. Elke Smits currently Heads the Science & In­novation Department of the Antwerp University Hospital in Belgium and has gained extensive experience in merging translational research and biobanking within a clinical setting. Prof. Elke Smits leads the European, Middle East and Africa Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking, as President. The goal is to bring together a forum to enable and enhance public-private biobank related partnerships within the European framework and foster biobank-based R&D and innovation within the pharmaceutical, biotech and ICT industry.

Andy Nelson works in Illumina’s Enterprise Informatics business unit, and currently runs backend operations for the Basespace suite of Informatics SaaS platforms, having previously managed Illumina’s internal R&D compute clusters. Prior to work­ing at Illumina, Andy was a cross-industry technical consultant, and brings over 2 decade’s experience in designing and managing high volume data storage and distributed compute systems across a diverse range of industries including tele­communications, insurance, banking, pharmaceutical and biotechnology. His main interest is enhancing the value of genomic and medical data through management and access models that enable collaboration at scale.

Lee Parker is Director of Data Privacy for Europe and Canada at Biogen. He is an experienced data privacy professional with numerous years of data privacy experi­ence. He provides direction and support to company employees and partners to ensure compliance with the various regulatory requirements related to data protec­tion and privacy. He is responsible for developing and implementing a data privacy programme across Biogen’s European operations and for preparing the company for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation which comes into force in May 2018. Lee is an English-qualified lawyer and has worked as legal counsel and privacy officer in law firms, an online gaming company, telecommunications provider, software developer and now specializes in privacy issues in the pharma­ceutical industry.

Marcel Bruinenberg completed his study at the University for Applied Sciences (Lab­oratory and Process Technologies) in 1993. Throughout his career Marcel has been involved in starting new laboratory facilities, ranging from small diagnostic labs to bigger genetic service laboratories. Since 2006 he has been a consultant for Life­Lines. Marcel accepted a full position at LifeLines in 2008. He started a new highly automated Biobanking laboratory. After that he headed the full genome analysis of 20.000 people of the LifeLines study, served as project leader of several add-on studies within LifeLines and was a pioneer in services for researchers that wanted to use LifeLines data, samples or facilities. He combined this with being project manager of LifeStore. This facility holds one of the largest automated -80 freezer stores worldwide (> 8 million samples) combined with 170 Ultra low temperature freezers. Currently Marcel is heading this facility.

Dr. Heli Salminen-Mankonen studied Medicine (PhD) at University of Turku, faculty of Medicine, in 2000. In 2002, she moved to UK for a Postdoctoral position at Im­perial College London. She is working as Docent in University of Turku since 2006 and she is one of the founding member and head of the Auria Biobank - the first Finnish hospital biobank in Finland based on the current legislation. During last few years more than 40 invited lectures on Biobanks and innovative medicine. Scientific coordination and management experience from several domestic and international projects. Co-organizers in various high level scientific meetings and events in na­tional as well as global level. Selected in top ten among 100 most influential Finnish health care professionals 2014 by Medi-Uutiset weekly newspaper. More than 25 publications in the field of modern molecular biology.

Clément Paillusseau, MSc, is working at Servier, in the Clinical Logistic Support De­partment. This department is in charge of coordination of Biomarkers, Centralized Biology and Samples Logistic for phase I to phase III studies, and covers oncology, metabolism (diabetes), cardiovascular, and neuropsychiatry therapeutic areas. He’s also heading the Company’s Biorepository, and works as a referent for questions related to samples management and its implementation in the R&D. Previously Clé­ment Paillusseau worked for 6 years as Senior Data manager on phase I studies.