Philip is Head of Discovery Research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology in Hamburg, Germany and Director General of the European Infrastructure for Chemical Biology, EU-OPENSCREEN. Previously, Philip was Chief Scientific Officer of the European ScreeningPort where he established small molecule drug discovery and translational research platforms. Previously, Philip has worked at GSK developing new drug discovery and development workflows and at Pfizer as part of hit discovery teams covering multiple therapeutic areas. He has a PhD and undergraduate degrees from Imperial College London and Post-doctoral experience from the University of Manchester researching fundamental biophysical properties of connective tissue macromolecules. Philip is highly engaged in advancing the science of early drug discovery with >100 publications in the field and has served on the Board of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, including as President in 2025.

Carsten Claussen is a Hamburg-based entrepreneur and innovator with deep expertise in life sciences, informatics, and industrial technology. He played a key role in making Hamburg a Sitzland of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in 2014 and has since led the development of the Fraunhofer ITMP Institute, with ScreeningPort as its founding site. Earlier he co-founded and served as CEO of European ScreeningPort GmbH, building it into a pioneering academic CRO. Previously he led Evotec Technologies—spun out from Evotec AG — together with Pfizer to a successful exit to Revvity for its screening instrumentation. Earlier, he held leadership roles at Daimler-Benz, contributing to global rail technology ventures.Carsten continues his work at Fraunhofer with a focus on Medical Data Science. He holds a professorship in business informatics, acts as a mentor, early-stage investor, and expert reviewer in informatics and life sciences, and publishes regularly.

As a Founder and CEO, Aniket oversees a variety of Technology and Strategy roles at Evolvus. Evolvus, has built significant data assets and has proven expertise, global operations in the area of Preclinical and Translational data driven drug discovery, since 2001, this entire business has been bootstrapped by Aniket over the last 23 years. Aniket is an alumni from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. At Penn his graduate work spanned multi-disciplinary areas at the intersection of Medicine and Biotechnology including gene regulation, transcriptomics and computational genomics. In 1999 he started his professional career at Wall Street in New York. His expertise and background spans the fields of Data Science, Molecular Biology, Text Mining, Bioinformatics as well as Computational Drug Design.

Dr Andreas Bender is from 2025 onwards Professor for Machine Learning in Medicine at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, leading a research group analyzing diverse types of medical, chemical, and biological data to support drug discovery and personalized medicine. Before that, he was Professor for Molecular Informatics at Cambridge University, and Director for Digital Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as an Associate Director for Data Science and AI in the Clinical Pharmacology & Safety Sciences group at AstraZeneca. On the entrepreneurial side, Andreas was involved in setting up Healx Ltd. and PharmEnable Ltd., both based in Cambridge/UK, as well as Pangea Bio in London/UK and Berlin/Germany. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands before his current post.