Officers of the Board

Sven Zenker (President)

The critical care environment, since its inception, has been one of the clinical fields with the highest data density. Continued development of the biotechnological, imaging, and physiologcial measurement toolkit available to the intensive care clinician is contributing to an increase in this data density which is threatening to overwhelm the practitioner, potentially leading to suboptimal extraction of knowledge from the available information, and thus suboptimal decision making. Unfortunately, validated quantitative analysis and decision support technologies available at the bedside have not kept up with the development of the data generating techniques. Having been involved in SCAI activities for now more than 10 years, I have come to value the uniquely diverse intellectual environment it provides. This diversity is manifest in the range of backgrounds, from active clinicians who make sure discussions remain grounded in clinical practice, and thus relevant to improving patient care, over engineers with implementation expertise, to mathematician and physicist able to contribute theoretical insight enabled by higher levels of abstraction. This diversity, however, is also tangible in the broad range of approaches chosen, which cover a broad spectrum from pure “black box” data driven learning technologies, to non-linear time series analysis techniques motivated by techniques successful in the physical sciences, to mechanistic modeling efforts, and numerous combinations thereof, of course usually combined with or at least driven by real-life data acquisition either in the lab or the hospital. This diversity has both led to uniquely stimulating discussions of approaches to understanding the pathophysiology of critical illness and developing technologies to help resolve it that would not have been possible in other environments, and catalyzed the formation of the transdisciplinary collaborations required to successfully rise to the resulting challenges.

Ludwig Christian Hinske
(Vice-President)

Ruben Zamora (Treasurer)

I have witnessed the birth of the Society and actively participated in many of its national and international meetings, both with poster and oral presentations. As a key part of my current research work, I am very interested in the use of computational and data-driven methods to help unravel the complexity of acute illness. After a few years as Secretary, embarking on being Treasurer of SCAI would be very beneficial to my understanding of the role of the Society, to my future interactions with the trainees and senior members of SCAI across all disciplines, and more importantly to my contribution to the work of the Society.

Manuela Ferrario (Secretary)

The world of critical care, and acute illness more generally, is complex and many factors orchestrate the patient response acting at different levels from cells to organs. I always deemed the SCAI meetings as a great chance to have an interdisciplinary and complementary perspective, a forum where clinicians, engineers, biologists, data scientists showcased the cutting-edge advancements and challenges in this field. The ever-evolving techniques, e.g. omics, artificial intelligence and computational models, are fundamental to understand the pathophysiology of critical illness and to truly develop a tailored and personalized patient therapy. I am excited to serve the society as secretary and to interact with the SCAI’s members, who are amazing, inspiring and committed to these ambitious goals.”