Miriam Elfström (PhD, MPH) is an epidemiologist by training and divides her time between the Screening Unit at the Regional Cancer Center of Stockholm Gotland and the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. She works closely with the regional cancer screening programs, particularly with monitoring, evaluation, and development. The focus of her research is optimizing cervical cancer prevention. Most recently, she has worked on HPV testing as a primary cervical screening tool and piloting HPV self-sampling for screening non-attenders. She is particularly interested in health systems strengthening and evaluating organization and quality assurance of cancer prevention programs. Email: miriam.elfstrom@ki.se

I am a medical doctor and PhD currently specializing in public health medicine at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark. I am project managing the projects “Consumer purchase data for improvement of public health” and the eConsent app, partially funded by a NIASC seed grant, as well as Helsefonden. Historically food frequency questionnaires has been used to assess lifestyle in research but have several limitations such as (missing data, reporting bias etc.). Recently large scale sources of consumer-purchasing data has become available and could be ideal to assess lifestyle, with each supermarket visit in effect corresponding to answering a 25.000 item questionnaire. Consumer purchasing data can be unobtrusively collected continuously over the year, supporting the detection and later communication of lifestyle determinants of disease flares and onset. The seed grant from the NIASC consortium has facilitated the construction of an e-consent platform using a validated patient consent toolkit, supported by NemID/bank ID, featuring control questions to secure that the information is understood. Over the last year of the NIASC consortium grant period, pilot studies will be conducted, and the developed consumer data will be used to conduct studies within the EU project framework OH EJP

At NIASC my job is to manage the NordScreen (nordscreen.org) project which is a publicly available, web-based application that delivers information of cancer screening programmes in the Nordic countries.  The website will provide standardized, evidence-based indicators for monitoring the performance of screening programmes based on registry data from the Nordic countries and Estonia. Currently we are focusing on screening for cervical cancer. The Nordscreen is a collaborative project and other NIASC partners include Karolinska Institutet, the Cancer Registry of Norway, the Icelandic Cancer Registry and the Finnish Cancer Registry, where I’m working as a project manager and researcher.

I’m also starting my PhD studies in Public Health at University of Helsinki (Finland). My research is closely related to NordScreen project. In my research I’m developing indicators to measure the performance of cervical cancer screening programmes in the Nordic countries. I have a Master’s Degree in Health Sciences from University of Tampere and I’ve previously been working with health policy and measuring quality in health care. E-mail: veli-matti.partanen@cancer.fi

Tomás Ruiz-López is a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies. He obtained this degree from the University of Granada in Spain, where he also received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and a M.Sc. in Software Engineering. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cancer Registry of Norway on the NIASC funded project called SOIGNONS, supervised by Dr. Mari Nygård, whose aim is to use mobile applications and gamification to convey information about the Human Pailloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer to the general public. In this way, people can nudge others to become aware of how important is to prevent this type of cancer by attending to screening. The ultimate goal is to try to increase the attendance to screening in the underscreened population. E-mail: Tomas.Ruiz-Lopez@kreftregisteret.no

I received my master degree in Bioinformatics from East China University of Science and Technology, and PhD degree in Bioinformatics from Technical University Munich, Germany. I have gained extensive knowledge of integration and analysis of drug combination and chemical genomics data, and I am proficient in programming using Java, Bash, Perl and R. Currently, I am a postdoc supervised by Professor Mads Melbye and Dr. Bartlomiej Wilkowski (Danish National Biobank at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark), and Professor Kristian Hveem (HUNT Biobank, Norway). My postdoc project aims to integrate the Danish Biobank Register system with Norwegian biobanks and registers as a first step towards a complete integration in all Nordic countries. In addition, I will work on designing additional tools (features) into the existing Biobank Register system, e.g. an intelligent search regarding specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) available and associated with various sample collections, leading to better access and linking of biological samples with associated both diagnostic and genomic data. E-mail: XULI@ssi.dk

 

My background is in molecular biology (BSc) and bioinformatics (MSc and PhD from the University of Tartu, Estonia). My thesis work involved computational methods for DNA copy number variant (CNV) detection and allelic phasing of CNVs. In Prof. Aarno Palotie¹s group (2 years in Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and 2 years at FIMM, University of Helsinki) I¹ve been working with chip- and sequencing-based rare functional variants in the context of migraine and schizophrenia. Additionally, I have been working with different aspects of genetics of isolated populations and their WGS-based imputation (the SISu – Sequencing Initiative Suomi project) and linking these genetic data to the health-related registry datasets available through the Finnish Biobank (IPHG – Industry Partnership for Human Genetics project). My NIACS-related work will involve developing computational pipeline and methods for imputing and studying rare and low-frequency variants in large populations-based cohorts available through the Finnish Biobank and the Estonian Genome Centre.