Law and public health -> Bio's

Dimitra Lingri - President

Dimitra Lingri (LLB, LLM, LLM) is a lawyer, specialised in public law and public health law, practising at the Council of the State, and working as the senior legal expert for the Greek National Organization for Healthcare Provision (EOPYY). Since 2010, she is responsible for the implementation of health policies of the European Union and European health legislation into the national legislative system (main fields: RWD, RWE, secondary use of data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), HTA (medical devices and pharmaceuticals), cross-border healthcare, clawback and rebate mechanisms, pharmaceutical legislation, and for the medical devices negotiation procedures). As the foremost legal expert of the Greek national payer, she has represented the interests of the state and the payer at the national negotiation committee, including for the high-cost innovative medicines, hepatitis C, etc.) and she has served the Board of Directors of EOPYY. She currently serves as the legal advisor of the Greek National HTA Committee. She is the Managing Director of the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network (EHFCN), where all the national payers and healthcare organisations combating fraud, corruption, and waste come together , where she also co-chairs the AI Working Group of EHFCN. She has represented EOPYY in international organizations (AIM, EUnetHTA, ISPOR, PPRI, EHFCN) and has represented the EU healthcare payers in bilateral and multilateral EMA, EU and Payers community meetings. In an individual capacity, she has been appointed as a legal expert in the Medical Devices Task Force of EUnetHTA, and since 2022, she serves as the national expert in the European Union’s HTA Coordination Group for Medical Devices. She is also an independent expert in STAG MEDEV Advisory Group (AG) of World Health Organisation (WHO), where she co-chairs the MEDEV Definitions Working Group (WG), the MEDEV HTA WG and the Pricing and Healthcare financing of the STAG MEDEV WHO. She is also a member of the Regulations WG and Medical Devices in Digital Health WG of STAG MEDEV AG of WHO. She served as a member of the Fair Pricing Working Group of WHO and she is currently a member of the Board of Directors of HTAi, she is participating in the DIA-HTAi Uncertainty WG, and she is co-chairing the RWE and AI IG of HTAi. She speaks English, French, Spanish and Greek and she is studying Russian

Elena Petelos - Vice president

Elena Petelos is a Senior Research Fellow in Public Health and a Lecturer in Evidence-Based Medicine and Evidence-Informed Policy at the University of Crete. She also teaches at Maastricht University and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. She has a background in medicine and biology, specialising in molecular oncology, re-training mid-career in health economics and policy, and holding a Fellowship in Governance and Economics of Development Technology and Innovation at the United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology.  She currently serves as the Vice President of the Health Technology Assessment section at the European Public Health Association, the Co-Chair for Real-World Evidence and Artificial Intelligence at HTAi, and as a Member of the Policy Officers Group of the European Medicines Agency. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of the European Forum for Primary Care leading the Vaccines WG and representing it in the European Network of Centres for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance. Her work focuses on regulatory frameworks, trial reporting and real-world evidence, benefit/risk communication, and new technologies, with a special focus on artificial intelligence. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Society of International Law (KNVIR) and of the International Law Association (ILA).

Farhang Tahzib - Steering committee

Farhang Tahzib is a senior public health physician, educator, Chair of the UK Faculty of Public Health Ethics Committee, and member of various international and national committees. Formerly Director of Public Health in the UK, worked internationally, teaching and Principal Investigator and Director of various programmes in particular around maternal health, prevention of maternal mortality and morbidity and traditional health care delivery system and primary care, funded by WHO, Carnegie Corporation, UNDP, World Bank and others.

Dr Spiros Georgakopoulos - Steering committee

Spiros V. Georgakopoulos was born in Greece, in 1987. He received a Bachelor in Mathematics and M.Sc. in “Computational Mathematics – Informatics on Education” from University of Patras, Greece, in 2010 and 2013 respectively. From 2019 he holds a Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics from the University of Thessaly, Greece at Pattern Recognition in Medical Images and Real-World Images developing novel Convolutional Neural Networks algorithms. In the same year he started a post doctoral research in the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at University of Thessaly, while he was also consultant of President of Hellenic National Organization for the Provision of Health Services (EOPYY) until 2020. In June 2022 was assigned Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, of University of Thessaly.

His research interests include applications in machine learning, computer vision, bio-informatics, fraud detection in medical prescriptions and real-world problem solving. He has developed novel learning algorithms for Convolutional Neural Networks, novel algorithms for lesion detection on medical imaging and robust methods for human pose recognition.

Markus Frischhut - Steering committee

Dr. iur. Markus Frischhut, LL.M. is Jean Monnet Professor, teaching and researching at MCI | The Entrepreneurial School® and Adjunct Professor at Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna. In his work, he focusses on EU law, EU health law (patient mobility, communicable diseases, European Health Union, etc.), EU values, as well as the relationship of EU law and ethics (e.g. in the field of digitalization). He has been speaker for EU institutions (European Parliament, European Central Bank, European Investment Bank, etc.), guest lecturer at international universities, and guest speaker at many international conferences. All his publications and other activities are documented and (as far as possible) available on the following website: https://jeanmonnet.mci.edu/.

Georgeos Margetidis - Steering committee

Georgios Margetidis holds a degree in EU law from Paris I University (Panthéon - Sorbonne) and a post graduate diploma from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris, France.

He started his career in Ministerial Cabinet positions in the Greek civil service, (1996-2001) where he participated in the planning and implementation phases of innovative policies in the health sector, local government and public administration in general.

CEO of the Cancer Control Center "Aghii Anarghiri" in Athens (2001-2005) he also oversaw the planning and execution of the works for new hospital facilities (324 beds , € 54M), funded under the EU structural funds, including the tender process. 

After several missions as an independent consultant, covering diverse countries (Albania, British Guyana, Serbia, Kossovo and the Baltic countries) and themes (healthcare professionals’ regulations, ethics and prevention of corruption in the health sector, hospital planning), he joined the European Commission in 2006.

Scientific project officer and then programme coordinator at the Consumers, Health, Agriculture and Food Executive Agency (Chafea), he has closely followed more than 150 projects co-funded by the EC covering key areas of public health: rare diseases, eHealth and health technology assessment; pharmaceuticals (pharmacovigilance, access and pricing issues); health systems reform and performance; use of structural and investment funds in the health sector; AMR under a one health approach, as well as communicable and non-communicable disease prevention. 

Currently he is head of sector in the Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) where he is responsible for the implementation of the EU health programme (2021-2027, EUR 4,3 billion) including planning, operational verification, budget execution, monitoring and reporting.

He is married and father of two children. In 2005 he received les “palmes académiques”.

LinkedIn profile here https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiosmarge/ 

David Patterson - Steering committee

David Patterson LLM, MSc has over 25 years' experience in international health, law and development with the UN system, intergovernmental organizations and NGOs including the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), UNAIDS, UNDP, WHO, ILO, and the (former) International HIV/AIDS Alliance. He holds masters’ degrees in law (McGill), and public policy & management (London - SOAS), as well as post-graduate studies in community health (Montreal), adult education, and program evaluation. In 1993 Patterson co-founded the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and later, as Director of International Programs, created the Network's HIV and law programs in the Caribbean and in East Africa. From 2009-2018 he initiated and managed IDLO's Health Law Program. During this time, he mobilized over US $12 million to strengthen and expand HIV-related legal services and rights in more than 25 low and middle-income countries and to build legal capacity to address non-communicable diseases. Patterson is currently a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Groningen.

Sujitha Subramanian - Steering committee

Dr Sujitha Subramanian is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law & Social Justice (SLSJ), University of Liverpool where she is also serving as the Associate Head of the Department. Since 2017, she is a member of the Liverpool University Central Research Ethics Committee and the SLSJ's  Law & NCD Unit. She joined EUPHA's Working Group on Access to Medicines in 2023. She has been a full-time academic since 2008 and has published in a number of international peer-reviewed journals. Sujitha’s research focuses on the identification and reinterpretation of the shifting dynamics of intellectual property (IP) law and policies and its increasingly complex interaction with other areas of law and policy. In this regard she has examined IP’s inter-relationship with constitutionalism, and is particularly interested in issues of balancing IP and public interest, specifically with regard to access of intangible assets, technologies and cultural goods in various sectors such as the pharmaceutical, environmental, technology and cultural heritage.

Marcin Mikos - Steering committee

Marcin Mikos is a Lawyer and a professor of medical and health sciences at the Department of Bioinformatics and Public Health at Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University (Poland). A graduate in Public Health from the Collegium Medicum of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and MBA studies in health care at the University of Economics in Krakow. He is a founding member of both the Polish Society of Medical Law and the Association of Polish Prophylactics. Specialises in patient safety, public health law and ethics, and emergency medical law. Author of numerous publications on patient safety and the legal aspects of practising medical professions.He has over 20 years of professional experience in government and non-governmental organizations and hospital management. He is the President of the Public Health Foundation of the Jagiellonian University

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