University of Bremen Professors Iris Pigeot and Tanja Schultz Named to Expert Council of the Federal Chancellery
The new Expert Council met for its first inaugural meeting today. It is the successor body to the Corona Expert Council, which met for the last time in April 2023. The 23 members will address the question of how the healthcare system and society can best respond to future health crises on a scientific basis. The Council of Experts can advise the Federal Government “ad hoc” on current public health issues.
The committee includes researchers from various disciplines, including public health, epidemiology, ethics, medicine, modeling, nursing science, psychology, social sciences, virology, computer science, statistics, and data processing and modeling. The members work voluntarily and independently. Professor Heyo Kroemer, CEO of the Charité, will take the chair. The co-chair is Professor Susanne Moebus from the Essen University Medical Center. “In order to best deal with future health crises, we need a broad-based council of experts. One lesson from the pandemic is that we need to make our healthcare system more resilient and robust – also with regard to the consequences of climate change and demographic developments. I would like to thank all members for their willingness to take part in this future task,” said Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
About Iris Pigeot and Tanja Schultz
Professor Iris Pigeot has been director of what is now the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS since March 2004 and has headed the biometrics and IT department there since 2001. After various research and teaching stays, including at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the LMU Munich, she accepted a professorship in “Statistics with a focus on biometry and methods of epidemiology” at the University of Bremen in September 2001. Her research includes digital public health as well as statistical methods and data protection issues in connection with data sharing, distributed data analysis, record linkage and the development of research data infrastructures. In 2010 she was awarded the “Susanne Dahms Medal for special achievements in biometrics” from the German Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS-DR) and has been President of the International Biometric Society since January 2024.
Tanja Schultz was appointed Professor of Cognitive Systems at the University of Bremen in April 2015. She previously worked as a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology from 2007 to 2015, as a research scientist from 2000 to 2006 and as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA in the USA from 2007. She researches and develops cognitive technical systems that adapt to the needs of their users by interpreting biosignals. To do this, she combines machine learning methods and signal processing with innovations in biosensor technology. For her overall work, she received the Alcatel-Lucent Research Prize for Technical Communication in 2012, and for her scientific contributions she was named a Fellow of the ISCA (2016), EASA (2017), IEEE (2020) and AAIA (2021). She is the spokesperson for the Minds, Media, Machines research focus at the University of Bremen, a member of the board of directors of the Leibniz Science Campus Digital Public Health and spokesperson for the DFG research group Lifespan AI.