The openEHR Fellowship

2026 cohort

• Mayank Agarwal
• Stefan Buttigieg
• Damien Donoghue
• Blanca Flores
• Edouard Gence
• Esteban Hebel
• Bright Ibezim
• Loes Jaspers
• Sheeren Khalifa
• Ariorad Moniri
• Olha Nikolaieva
• Abigail Okonu
• Marco Pingitore
• Santiago Pinto
• Lena Schell-Majoor

Senior fellows

Experienced members of the community who support the fellows alongside the supervisors.

• 

  Dr Seref Arikan

  Read bio

  Seref is a software developer, consultant and technical lead at Ocean Informatics UK, where he has worked since 2010. He began working with openEHR in 2002 and has released open-source openEHR software since 2009. His PhD at UCL CHIME, supervised by Professor David Ingram, explored integrating openEHR with AI for clinical decision support. His current focus is implementing openEHR persistence and the AQL specifications.

• 

  Dr Koray Atalag

  Read bio

  Trained as a medical doctor but an engineer at heart, Koray did his PhD in health informatics on openEHR and has almost 30 years’ experience in digital health as a developer, researcher and entrepreneur. He was a member of the first openEHR Foundation Management Board and has been heavily involved in clinical modelling and software development. After 14 years of research at the University of Auckland, he co-founded The Clinician and now runs his own consultancy, GALATA-Digital.

  LinkedIn

• 

  Dr Diego Boscá Tomás

  Read bio

  Diego is a computer engineer with a PhD from the Universitat Politècnica de València. He has designed and deployed semantically interoperable healthcare information systems using openEHR, HL7 FHIR, OMOP CDM, ISO 13606 and HL7 CDA, and clinical terminologies such as SNOMED CT and ICD-10. He is a certified specialist in HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR and SNOMED.

• 

  Dr Rong Chen

  Read bio

  Rong is Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Head of the Medical Informatics Group at Cambio Healthcare Systems in Sweden, leading research and development in clinical decision support and knowledge management. He led the Java reference implementation of openEHR, contributed to several core specifications, and is the lead author of the Guideline Definition Language (GDL). He has been co-chair of the Specifications Editorial Committee since May 2023.

  LinkedIn

• 

  Dr Sebastian Garde

  Read bio

  Sebastian is a health informatician with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. As Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems he is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager, which grew out of his research on the governance of clinical content models. He has been involved with openEHR since 2004.

  LinkedIn

• 

  Dr Chunlan Ma

  Read bio

  Chunlan is a gynaecologist and obstetrician who has developed openEHR-based APIs and applications for more than 15 years, with a particular interest in openEHR data reporting. She was the lead author of the openEHR AQL specification and has worked on Reference Model implementations, template transformations, platform APIs and query engines.

2025 fellows

Members of the first Fellowship cohort.

• 

  Dr Somayeh Abedian

  Read bio

  Somayeh is a health informatics executive and researcher with more than 18 years’ experience in health information systems and interoperability standards. She began working with openEHR in 2008 and spent over 17 years at the eHealth centre of Iran’s Ministry of Health, helping design the national openEHR-based EHR infrastructure. She is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Toronto and a Senior Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention in Austria.

• 

  Ian Bennett

  Read bio

  Ian is a Product Specialist at Better, where he has supported openEHR projects for three years. A former NHS pharmacist, he brings a practical understanding of clinical workflows to data modelling and openEHR strategy. His fellowship focuses on reusable artefacts, such as data governance strategies, that support scalable openEHR implementations.

• 

  Dr Osama Elhassan

  Read bio

  Osama is a digital health leader and Chairperson and Co-Founder of ZIMAM, promoting digital health across the Middle East, and a 2025 HIMSS Changemaker in Health. Through the fellowship he aims to establish an openEHR Middle East Chapter and support knowledge transfer across clinical, technical and governance domains.

• 

  Dr Lars Fuhrmann

  Read bio

  Lars is a resident ophthalmologist focused on the usability and interoperability of healthcare IT in ophthalmology, using FHIR and openEHR. His goal is to advance standardised data models in ophthalmology to improve data exchange and clinical outcomes.

• 

  Nicola Hall

  Read bio

  Nicola is a Consultant Epidemiologist supporting Jamaica’s Ministry of Health and Wellness in developing an electronic surveillance system. Since 2019 she has worked with local experts on clinical modelling with openEHR templates, and she aims to strengthen health systems and public health planning through digital health.

• 

  Dr Martin Koch

  Read bio

  Martin is a clinical knowledge modeller and Clinical Knowledge Administrator (CKA) for CatSalut’s CKM. With a background in biomedical engineering, he has worked on hardware and software in medical technology at every stage of product creation, from in-vitro studies to clinical trials and regulatory compliance. Now focused on public-sector interoperability, he has also lectured at a university of design and engineering. Through the fellowship he aims to build scalable openEHR tools for a more connected health ecosystem.

• 

  Dr Xabier Michelena Vegas

  Read bio

  Xabier is a rheumatologist (MD, PhD) and Clinical Informatics Lead of the Digital Health Strategy at CatSalut. He began working with openEHR in 2022 at Vall d’Hebron Hospital, where he led innovation projects, piloted openEHR for primary-use registries, deployed EHRbase and explored ETL strategies aligned with OMOP. At CatSalut he works on a unified, consensus-driven approach to structuring EHRs and orchestrating care processes across healthcare networks.