He is a faculty member and the Director of Science at the Africa Health Research Institute. He chairs the interim Steering Committee of the Africa Population Cohort Consortium and co-leads the Welllcome funded award for the APCC start-up. He is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Health Cohort Consortium (IHCC) and the H3Africa Data and Biosample Access Committee. He is honorary chief scientist at the South African Medical Research Council and the past Director of the DSI-funded South African Population Research Infrastructure Network (SAPRIN). Kobus graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Pretoria in 1979, did a masters in Bioengineering at the University of Cape Town and registered as a public health physician in 1994 following a registrarship at MEDUNSA.

Melek Chaouch is a Tunisian scientist whose work is dedicated to advancing molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics research across Africa. His career, since earning a PhD in 2014, has been closely involved with major collaborative initiatives aimed at building scientific capacity on the continent. A significant focus of this work has been on enhancing data infrastructure and standardization. This includes contributions as a Node Ambassador for the pan-African H3ABioNet network and co-leadership in developing the African Population Ontology project, which seeks to create standardized frameworks for representing the rich diversity of African populations. These efforts are foundational to several ongoing large-scale projects that rely on robust data curation and management. He is currently involved with the African Genomics Data Hub, the Psychiatric Genomics Africa Consortium, and the Africa Biogenome Project. Within the African Bioinformatics Institute, his role co-chairing the training working group supports a collective mission to develop bioinformatics and data curation skills for the next generation of African scientists. This collective work reflects a shared commitment to strengthening scientific networks and fostering innovation in genomic data science across Africa.

Dr. Mónica Muñoz Torres is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz; her work focuses on the critical challenge of developing the socio-technical foundations needed to realize the promise of artificial intelligence in biomedical sciences. Her expertise includes genomics, biocuration, knowledge representation, and data harmonization. She leads the NIH-funded Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI)'s teams focused on Standards, Practices, and Quality Assessment, as well as Teaming and Collaboration. Dr. Muñoz Torres also co-leads the Clinical and Phenotypic Data Capture Workstream in the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, responsible for the development of standards and tools to help the genomics community utilize phenotypic, clinical, and family health history information to improve human health. AI offers an unprecedented opportunity to uncover new insights in complex biomedical data. One of the biggest risks to achieving this is misunderstanding the most critical component: the data itself. While we rightly focus on the potential of new AI technologies, we often overlook that data sets alone are not ground truths. To build trustworthy AI, we must first establish trustworthy data. Dr. Muñoz Torres' work centers on defining the character of the data. Motivated by years of experience using comparative genomics to advance our understanding of human health and disease, she seeks to leverage her expertise under the light of artificial intelligence to improve socio-technical practices, foster research communities, and encourage participation from all professional backgrounds in genomics and biomedical informatics.

Dr. Nivedita Yadav is a Data Curator at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), India, specializing in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. She holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from India and has interdisciplinary training that bridges biological sciences, computation, and data management. Her research and professional work focus on genomics, transcriptomics, and phenomics, with particular emphasis on biological data curation, metadata harmonization, and implementation of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles. She is actively involved in the design and development of national-level biological data resources, contributing to initiatives such as BioVerse and structured phenome data repositories, which aim to improve data quality, interoperability, and long-term usability. Dr. Yadav plays a key role in developing data submission guidelines, standardized metadata templates, and quality-control workflows to support researchers in sharing reproducible and well-annotated datasets. In parallel, she is committed to capacity building and mentorship, promoting best practices in bioinformatics, scientific data management, and ethical research conduct through training, guidance, and collaborative engagement. Her broader academic vision is to strengthen India's biological data infrastructure while enabling seamless integration of indigenous biological resources into the global research ecosystem. Through her work, she contributes to advancing open science, data-driven discovery, and sustainable bioinformatics platforms that support translational and fundamental biological research.

Dr. Saurabh Raghuvanshi is a Professor at Dept. of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus, New Delhi. He has expertise in the area of plant genomics and bioinformatics and has carried out pioneering work in 'Big Data analytics' and Biocuration at national level. Recently, he led the development of the Indian Biological Data Center (IBDC), which is the first life science data repository of the nation. Earlier, he established and conducted genome level data analytics for sequencing and annotation of the rice genome, which was the first genome sequencing project of India. Further, whole genome assembly and annotation of Mycobacterium indicus pranii was also performed, again for the first time in India. The current focus of his group includes: Characterizing miRNA mediated molecular regulatory schema responsible for controlling stress response in rice. They are also focusing on multiomic characterization of biodiversity (medicinal plants) to enable conservation of adaptive plasticity and catalyse natural product based drug discovery.