Keynote Speakers

keynote placeholderProfessor Kenneth Rothman

Dr. Rothman is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health and a Distinguished Fellow Emeritus at the Research Triangle Institute, a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving the human condition. His research interests in epidemiology have spanned a range of topics, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, birth defects, injuries, environmental exposures and drug epidemiology. His main career focus, however, has been the development and teaching of the concepts and methods of epidemiologic research.


He was the founding editor of the journal Epidemiology, an Editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. He has written two epidemiologic textbooks: Modern Epidemiology, and Epidemiology – An Introduction. He holds an honorary MD degree from the University of Aarhus.

Profile: Kenneth Rothman | Academic Profile | Boston University


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Professor Laura Howe

Laura Howe is a Professor of Epidemiology & Medical Statistics at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research draws on life course and causal inference approaches to understand the development of physical and mental health across the life course, with a particular focus on social influences on health. She has experience of statistical methods for repeated measures data and methods for the integration of genetic data into epidemiological studies, and has carried out methodological research in these areas.

Profile: Laura Howe | Academic Profile | University of Bristol


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Professor Mika Kivimaki, FMedSci

Professor Mika Kivimaki, FMedSci is an epidemiologist at University College London, UK and University of Helsinki, Finland. He leads the renowned Whitehall study, an on-going epidemiological cohort study of 10,000 British adults, and several research consortia, including the IPD-Work consortium of 17 European cohort studies. His research has informed clinical guidelines and recommendations, including those from the European Guidelines on Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, NICE Guideline on Disability and Frailty Prevention, and Lancet Commissions on Diabetes and Dementia. Professor Kivimaki is recognized as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Academy of Europe.

Profile: Mika Kivimaki | Academic Profile | UCL

Mika Kivimaki | Academic Profile | University of Helsinki


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Professor Naja Hulvej Rod

Naja Hulvej Rod is Professor of Epidemiology at University of Copenhagen. Her research deals with large public health challenges including sleep, health inequality and childhood adversity. She is leading the interdisciplinary Complexity and Big Data Group, and she has a particular interest in causal inference theory and how it intersects with methodological insights from complex systems theory. Naja Hulvej Rod is PI of the Danish Life Course Cohort (DANLIFE) Study, which leverage multi-dimensional exposome data covering measured lifetime exposures across multiple social, environmental, and biological dimensions. She serves as Chair of the Council on Health and Disease Prevention (Vidensråd for Forebyggelse), and she has participated in numerous boards and committees across Europe, including the Swedish Research Council, the Finnish Research Council, and the French Health Data Hub. She was awarded the Elite Researcher Prize by the Danish Ministry for Research and Higher Education in 2022.

Profile: Naja Hulvej Rod | Academic Profile | University of Copenhagen


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Professor Sonia Hernández-Díaz, MD, DrPH

Sonia Hernández-Díaz, MD, DrPH is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she serves as Director of the Pharmacoepidemiology & Real World Evidence (RWE) Program.  Her research focuses on evaluating drug safety during pregnancy. She also works on the application of innovative methodologic concepts to increase the efficiency and the validity of observational studies. In recent projects her team has emulated hypothetical target trials to evaluate infertility treatments, COVID-19 vaccines, and antidiabetic drugs in pregnancy. She has served as chair for the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration, as member of the NICHD Pregnancy & Neonatology (PN) Study Section, and as member of the Teratogenic Information Services (TERIS) Advisory Board. She was elected President of the Society for Perinatal and Pediatric Epidemiology in 2014 and President of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology in 2015.

Profile: Sonia Hernandez-Diaz | Academic Profile | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health