Dr. Sebastian Brandt (Bonn, Germany)

Keynote: Challenges in Scientific Publishing: Predatory Practices, Fake Content, AI

Dr. Sebastian Brandt works as a program officer at the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Bonn, where he focuses on developments in scholarly publishing and issues related to openness in research. He has represented the DFG in the international expert network “Knowledge Exchange.” Dr. Brandt earned his Ph.D. in the history of science and universities from the University of Freiburg. He is also a trained librarian and worked in academic libraries for several years.

Dr. Amber Van Den Akker (Bath, UK)

Keynote: Commercial Determinants of Health: Corporate Power, Harms and Public Health

Dr Amber van den Akker is a researcher specialising in the commercial determinants of health, with a focus on how corporate practices influence public health policy. In her research, she adopts a complex systems approach to identify and intervene in the structural and political aspects of the commercial determinants of health.

She is part of the Local Health and Global Profits (LHGP) research consortium, based within the Centre for 21st Century Public Health at the University of Bath. Her current research examines how local governments in England can address to the commercial determinants of health, with particular emphasis on strengthening governance, avoiding and addressingconflicts of interest, and employing framing to enable cross-sectoral policy action.

Dr van den Akker has a background in public health policy and has previously worked as a consultant with the World Health Organization’s Department of Commercial and Economic Determinants of Health.

Prof. Dr. Stephen Cole (Chapel Hill, USA)

Keynote: Evidence, Higher-Order Evidence and Beyond

Stephen R. Cole, Ph.D., is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. He is co-Director of the UNC Causal Inference Research Laboratory, Associate Director of the Center for AIDS Research Biostatistics Core, and Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology. Dr. Cole also serves on the United States Department of Health and Human Services HIV Treatment Guidelines Panel. He previously served on the AIDS and Clinical Epidemiology and HIV Comorbidities and Clinical Studies NIH study sections, and as Associate Editor at Epidemiology and Statistics in Medicine. Dr. Cole has published more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers, with 95 papers having 95 or more citations and 19 papers cited 500 or more times. His honors include the Society for Epidemiologic Research’s Excellence in Education Award (2018) and the Marshall Joffe Epidemiologic Methods Research Award (2022), as well as the American College of Epidemiology’s Outstanding Contributions to Epidemiology Award (2015). Dr. Cole’s research focuses on the interface of epidemiology and statistics, as applied to HIV and birth outcomes. His current work centers on developing improved methods for integrating multiple sources of health information.

Prof. Dr. George Davey Smith (Bristol, UK)

Keynote: Is there a Future for Mendelian Randomization?

Professor George Davey Smith FRS, FMedSci, MD, FRCP is a clinical epidemiologist and director of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) at the Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol. His research has pioneered approaches to causal inference in population health sciences, including developing and applying Mendelian randomization approaches. He is currently Scientific Director of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and is a member of the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM), of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and received the 25^th Anniversary MRC Millenium medal in 2025.