Lecturers Conference Program

Trained as a nurse, Maëlle Achard holds Master’s degrees in Educational Sciences, Research Management, and Public Health. She is currently a PhD candidate in Global Health at the University of Geneva. Her doctoral research, conducted within the SPIRIT project (Supporting Patient and Public Involvement in Research through Clinical Trial Units), examines how patients and the public can meaningfully influence the design and conduct of clinical research. Her broader interests include the evaluation of engagement practices, the professionalization of patient roles, and the development of citizen science approaches in health research.

Andrea Balmer is a Research Associate at the Foundation for Patient Safety and leads the "Room of Horrors" project. She earned her doctorate in occupational and organizational psychology from the University of Bern, focusing on work-related stress and health in social work. Through her experience in diverse healthcare settings and her involvement in many patient safety implementation projects at the Foundation, she has a deep understanding of the demands placed on healthcare professionals and organizations, as well as effective strategies for optimizing safety and care processes. She is dedicated to fostering interprofessional collaboration among healthcare professionals and enhancing their competencies and capabilities in patient safety.

David Chambers is Deputy Director for Implementation Science in the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). David Chambers manages a team focusing on efforts to build and advance the field of Implementation Science through funding opportunities, training programs, research activities, dissemination platforms, and enhancement of partnerships and networks to integrate research and practice. From 2008 through the fall of 2014, David Chambers served as Chief of the Services Research and Clinical Epidemiology Branch (SRCEB) of the Division of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). He arrived at NIMH in 2001, brought to the Institute to run the Dissemination and Implementation Research Program within SRCEB, developing a portfolio of grants to study the integration of scientific findings and effective clinical practices in mental health within real-world service settings. From 2006 to the fall of 2014, David Chambers also served as Associate Director for Dissemination and Implementation Research, leading National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiatives around the coordination of dissemination and implementation research in health, including a set of research announcements across multiple NIH Institutes and Centers, annual scientific conferences, and a summer training institute. He received his A.B. degree (with Honors) in Economics from Brown University, and an MSc and DPhil degree in Management Studies (Organisational Behaviour) from Oxford University (UK).

Catherine Decouttere is Director at the Access-To-Medicines Research Centre of KU Leuven and director at the Leuven One Health Institute. She holds a Master’s in Civil Engineering and a PhD in Business Economics on Sustainable Immunization System Design for sub-Saharan Africa, both from KU Leuven. Central to her work is the development of conceptual and mathematical systems models to support policy makers and stakeholders in the transition toward more sustainable and resilient socio-economic systems related to human health and One Health (human-animal-ecosystem). Her key application fields are pandemic preparedness, health systems for infectious and chronic disease prevention and control, system design for medicine innovations.
Outside of academia, Catherine gained experience in public services wastewater management practices and flood control strategies in Belgium. She held leading R&D and innovation positions at Alpro, a plant-based food innovator where she aligned innovation strategy with sustainability principles. Later on she coached a diversity of industries and service organizations in Human Centered Design and Design Thinking.
Her main fields of expertise are systems thinking and systems modeling for Global Health and One Health, sustainability and human-centered design.

Sabina De Geest is a Professor of Nursing at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Basel (Switzerland), and a part-time Professor of Nursing at KU Leuven (Belgium). She also holds adjunct faculty positions at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University (USA).
Professor De Geest leads the PIONEER international research group, an interdisciplinary team focused on behavioral (e.g., medication adherence) and psychosocial issues in chronic illness, including transplantation, rheumatology, and geriatric populations. Her research is driven by implementation science methodologies and centers on developing innovative care models, many of which leverage eHealth technologies.
In addition, her work explores psychosocial and behavioral pathways and their impact on outcomes in chronic illness, as well as the development and validation of instruments to assess patient-reported outcomes.  She is leading the Psychosocial Interest Group of the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (stcs.ch). She is also a co-founder of the Swiss Implementation Science Network (impact-dph.unibas.ch).

Benjamin Häberle is a Medical Affairs Professional with over four years of experience in innovative evidence generation and clinical research. As the Integrated Evidence Generation Lead at Novartis Pharma GmbH, he has been co-creating the local German integrated evidence strategy in the areas of immunology and kidney disease, aiming to maximize project impact through a focus on healthcare relevance and optimal project design. He is the local study lead of the Novartis implementation science study HELyx in hidradenitis suppurativa and is embracing implementation science as an approach for optimal evidence generation.

Roman Kislov is Professor of Health Policy and Management at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has substantial experience in leading qualitative longitudinal research into the processes and practices of knowledge mobilization. Roman’s research interests include communities of practice, boundary spanning, collective leadership and theory development. His work crosses disciplinary boundaries between organization studies, public administration and implementation science.
Roman is Knowledge Mobilisation Lead in Care Work (NIHR Adult Social Care Workforce Research Partnership) and Deputy Theme Lead for Implementation Science in the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester. He is Associate Editor of Implementation Science Communications and sits on the funding committee of the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme.
Prior to pursuing an academic career, Roman worked as a doctor for a gold mining company in Central Asia, combining clinical duties with a managerial role.

James Lister is the Senior Director, Healthcare Improvement Capabilities Lead at Lilly, where he spearheads the global application of improvement and implementation science methodologies to bridge the know-do gap and enable the uptake of evidence into routine practice. James is driven by the goal of sustainably improving patient outcomes at scale and believes the key to achieving this is through cross-stakeholder collaboration and addressing systemic barriers in care. James holds a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and has a background in healthcare strategy consulting, where he supported pharmaceutical and biotech companies to solve complex business challenges, with a focus on Medical Affairs and Market Access strategy, functional transformation, and capability building.

Giulia Loffreda is a Scientist at the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, World Health Organization. She is dedicated to strengthening primary health care and advancing equitable health systems, with a particular focus on bridging the gap between evidence and policy in the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).
At the Alliance, she leads multi-country initiatives that embed implementation research within health system processes, generating lessons on how evidence can inform the design, adaptation, and scale-up of NCD interventions in primary health care.
Giulia applies systems thinking, political economy analysis, and an embedded implementation research approach to foster collaboration between researchers and policymakers, strengthening learning health systems and promoting evidence-informed decision-making.

Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken is Professor of Design Science at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), specializing in digital health, healthcare, and sports. She heads the Institute for Design Research and has previously served as Deputy Director of the Department of Design. She also leads the cross-institutional Digital Health Design Living Lab (DHD LL), an interdisciplinary platform developing innovative, research-based solutions for the digital healthcare system in collaboration with universities, hospitals, patient organizations, and healthcare professionals. Trained as a sports scientist (TU Darmstadt) and active in design and HCI research, her work focuses on human-centered, evidence-based (co-)design and the evaluation of technology-driven health solutions, including Serious Games, Exergames and digital or AI-supported healthcare tools. Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken has received multiple awards, including the SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award, and is a frequent speaker at major events such as TEDxZurich. In 2020, she was named one of Switzerland’s 100 Digital Shapers.

Frank Rühli is the Dean of the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich. He studied Medicine at the University of Zurich and began his career at the Institute of Diagnostic Radiology, University Hospital Zurich. Following an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship, he completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide, where he also held a lectureship. From 2003 to 2014, he served in various academic roles at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zurich, completing his habilitation in 2007.
He founded and directed the Center of Evolutionary Medicine and later became the founding Chair and Director of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich. He holds an EMBA from the University of Zurich and is a member of both the Science and Medical Faculties.

Judith Safford trained as an economist in Germany and has dedicated her professional life to excellence in nonprofit management. Affected by spondyloarthritis and colitis since early adulthood, she is also a cancer survivor.
Her special interest is the involvement of patients in healthcare, particularly through their participation in medical research. She is co-founder and President of the RheumaCura Foundation, which advocates for people-centered arthritis research. Furthermore, she engages as a patient expert in healthcare research projects, teaches PPI to patients and researchers, is a PPI expert in the Investigator Initiated Clinical Trials Programme of the Swiss National Science Foundation, former director of Swiss registry for inflammatory rheumatic disease and is a Fellow of Sciana: The Health Leaders Network.

Kevin Selby works as an Attending Physician at Unisanté, Lausanne. He has divided his time between the general internal medicine clinic and teaching and research.
Kevin Selby's current research focuses on cancer prevention. He is studying how organized cancer screening programs work. By tailoring screening to risk profiles, he hopes to reduce side effects in low-risk patients and improve screening rates in high-risk patients. In addition, he is leading a research project supported by the Tobacco Prevention Fund (FPT) which is testing the implementation of a new approach to smoking cessation counseling by primary care physicians. Finally, he is interested in co-production or participatory research methodologies.