SDSC Hackathon

Oksana is a disruptive innovator bringing her positive energy to projects. Driven by her curiosity and can-do attitude she excels in industrial and academic contexts. Oksana earned her PhD in Life Sciences and Bioinformatics from the University of Lausanne after two MSc in Bioinformatics and in Information Systems from the University of Geneva. For more than 10 years, she has been committed to actively promoting the value of data science and advocating the best practices for reproducible and ethical research. She believes that Swiss Data Science Center is a key player in building a competitive data economy in Switzerland leveraging its innovative potential and renown commitment to quality.

Nora earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science/Bioinformatics from the University of Tübingen, where she focused on the in silico design of peptide-based vaccines using combinatorial optimization and machine learning. During her postdoctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and later as a staff scientist at the New York Genome Center, she worked on metagenomics, infectious diseases, and cancer. In 2015, Nora joined NEXUS Personalized Health Technologies at ETH Zurich where her focus shifted towards the management of clinical and biomedical research data. In May 2024, she joined the Swiss Data Science Center as Head of Biomedical Data Science.

Roberto holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Particle Physics from the University of Torino, Italy. He has worked for several years in fundamental research as a senior fellow and data scientist at the CERN Experimental Physics division and on a research project supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). In 2018 he moved to EPFL to work on data mining and Machine Learning techniques for the built environment and renewable energies. He has started and led multiple collaborations with academic and industry partners in the energy domain. Roberto joined the SDSC in September 2021 as a Principal Data Scientist with the mission of accompanying industries, NGOs and international organizations through their data science journey.

Rok obtained a B.A. in Physics from Washington University in St.Louis in 2003. After obtaining his PhD in theoretical Astrophysics from the University of Washington in 2010, Rok spent several years as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Science, University of Zürich. Seeking new challenges, he moved to the ETH Scientific IT Services group, where he helped researchers across different ETH domains solve their (big) data analysis problems. He specialized in optimizing and scaling up data analysis tasks by mapping them to high-performance computing resources. Since July 2017 he has been at the Swiss Data Science Center developing Renku, the Center's data science platform.

Silvia holds an MSc in Computer Science from EPFL and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of York, UK. She has been a senior research fellow at the University of Trento and later at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Here, she had the chance to work on Marie Curie and ERC projects relating to natural language processing. From 2012 to 2019, she was a Senior Manager and NLP expert at ELCA Informatique Switzerland, whose AI department she helped create and expand. Silvia joined the Swiss Data Science Center in 2019 and is currently its Chief Transformation Officer, in charge of the team leading organizations to digital transformation.

Saurabh Bhargava, joined the SDSC as a Principal Data Scientist in the Industry Cell at the Zürich office in 2022. Saurabh previously worked in the retail sector and the advertising industry in Germany. He lead and built various data products for customers using state of the art machine learning methods and industrializing them thereby adding value for the customers. He completed his PhD from ETH Zürich in June 2017 specializing in machine learning applications on Audio data. He obtained his Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from EPFL and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, India in 2011 and 2009 respectively. His interests and expertise are in combining state of the art data science and data engineering tools for building scalable data products.