Clive Sabel is an internationally renowned Spatial Epidemiologist. He heads BERTHA, a newly established Novo Nordisk Foundation Big Data Centre for Environment and Health, at Aarhus University.

“BERTHA: The Danish Big Data Centre for Environment and Health”

The Big Data revolution in medical, environmental and population registers, personalised sensors and social media data mining, can help us understand the complex interactions between environmental pollutants and human health. Assembling, linking and analysing diverse, huge datasets, developing algorithms and intelligent data analytics, all applied to specific health outcomes has its challenges, but one that could yield significant epidemiological results. This talk will discuss the opportunities and problems, technically and ethically, of combining Big Data to address some of the most challenging issues within the environment and health field.

Christian Erikstrup is a professor/chair and chief physician at the Department of Clinical Immunology, Aarhus University Hospital. He is head of blood production in the Central Denmark Region.

“Health and disease among 120,000 blood donors in The Danish Blood Donor Study”

Prof. Erikstrup is a co-initiator and member of the steering committee of the Danish Blood Donor Study (DBDS), a cohort and bio bank with 120,000 participants. DBDS performs studies within blood donor health, general health and transfusion medicine. DBDS is a unique resource because of both genomic data and access to consecutively collected plasma samples. CE is a member of the management group in The Danish Big Data Centre for Environment and Health (BERTHA). The talk will describe DBDS, results and possibilities and discuss how DBDS can give access to very granular studies of the relationship between environmental exposures and health.