Confirmed speakers

Antonio Abbate

Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

A native of Fondi, Italy, Dr. Abbate joined the VCU Pauley Heart Center as Assistant Professor of Medicine and was promoted to the rank of Professor of Medicine and of Physiology and Biophysics, with Tenure, in June 2020. He was selected for the James C. Roberts Esquire Professorship in Cardiology in October 2013. Dr. Abbate divides his time between the Coronary Intensive Care Unit, the General Cardiology Practice, and sees patients in the Ambulatory Care Center at VCU Medical Center.
Dr. Abbate is the recipient of numerous awards and honors in both Italy and the United States, including several Young Investigator Awards for cardiology research, induction into AOA Honor Medical Society in 2005, and several Excellence in Teaching awards. He is a member of the European Society of Cardiology, the American Heart Association Basic Science Council and the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Abbate also leads a multidisciplinary team conducting Clinical and Translational Research Program. He is the lead investigator in several preclinical research studies in the VCU Pauley Heart Center and the Victoria Johnson Research Laboratories, examining the role of inflammation in heart disease. Dr. Abbate is also principal investigator or co-investigator on pilot clinical studies funded by the National Institute of Health, the American Heart Association, or Industry, aimed at identifying novel anti-inflammatory therapies for patients with acute myocardial infarction or heart failure. 
Dr. Abbate is the Medical Director of Clinical Research Unit in the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research. He has authored or co-authored over 200 articles, reviews and editorials that have been published in professionals journals. In addition, he has participated in more than 300 oral and poster presentations to national and international meetings.  He is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Cardiology, the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, PLOSONE, and Translational Medicine, and he is a peer reviewer for over a twenty international journals. 

 

Andrea Ablasser

Global Health Institute, EPFL, Switzerland

 

Ivona Aksentijevich

National Human Genome Research Institute, USA

Dr. Ivona Aksentijevich obtained her medical degree from Belgrade University in the former Yugoslavia. In 1990 she joined Dr. Daniel Kastner in the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) to work as a post-doctoral fellow on the positional cloning of the gene mutated in patients with familial Mediterranean fever (FMF), and later stayed in the same group as a staff scientist. In 2010, she moved with Dr. Kastner to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and continues to study the genetics of monogenic autoinflammatory diseases. Dr. Aksentijevich is certified in clinical molecular genetics by the American Board of Medical Genetics, and supervises a CLIA-certified laboratory for autoinflammatory disease diagnostics in the IDS. Her scientific accomplishements are numerous, and include the identification of several genes underlying known autoinflammatory diseases as well as the discovery of multiple previously unknown conditions. She is a past president of the International Society on Systemic Autoinflammatory Diseases (ISSAID).

 

Sulaiman Al-Mayouf

King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Saskya Angevare

KAISZ, Netherlands

 

Suma Balan

Department of Rheumatology, School of Medicine, Kochi, India 

Dr Suma Balan trained in India at JIPMER in Paediatrics following which she went to the UK and undertook a rigorous tertiary paediatric training programme from Nottingham,UK (the second largest Children Hospital attendances in the UK) with further focussed Special Interest training in Paediatric Rheumatology. Her areas of interest are juvenile idiopathic arthritis, J SLE and regional pain syndromes in childhood.

She has presented and published in international paediatric rheumatology and nephrology conferences and is an active member of the paediatric rheumatology faculty in India.

David Beck

Clinical Fellow at National Human Genome Research Institute, USA

Alexandre Belot

Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France

A. Belot is an academic researcher and clinician in the field of immunology and pediatric rheumatology. He was trained both in Lyon and Paris in the unit of pediatric Immunology of Pr Alain Fischer at Necker's Hospital. After a PhD in Immunology, he attended a post-doctoral position in genetics in Manchester in the group of Pr Yanick Crow. Since 2013, he is the Head of the Pediatic Rheumatology Unit & the National Referee Centre for rare juvenile rheumatisms and systemic autoimmune diseases "RAISE" at the Pediatric Hospital "HFME" at the Hospices Civils de Lyon. Involved in the national rare disease program, he co-chairs the national network on rare autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases (FAI2R, www.fai2r.org) and is involved in the national research program on inflammatory diseases (www.imidiate.org). His research group inside the Lab "Innate Immunity in autoimmune and infectious diseases" headed by Dr T Walzer is dedicated to the molecular understanding of early-onset inflammatory diseases, with a special interest for monogenic lupus. He is also running the educational program on pediatic rheumatology in France. He is the author of more than 150 publications in the field of pediatric rheumatology.

 

Kaan Boztug

Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases 
Scientific Director, Children’s Cancer Research Institute / St Anna Kinderkrebsforschung

Adjunct PI, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Medical University of Vienna
Consultant in Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, St. Anna Children’s Hospital Vienna

Lori Broderick

UC San Diego

Paul Brogan

Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), United Kingdom

Dr Paul Brogan works in the department of Rheumatology at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and is section head for Infection, Inflammation and Rheumatology in the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH).

He has developed a successful clinical and academic programme of work dedicated to the developing field of paediatric vasculitis and autoinflammatory diseases, in concert with a world-leading clinical service for these rare diseases as Chair of the Vasculitis Consortium and Clinical Lead for Autoinflammatory Disease at GOSH.

 

Mireia Coma

MIREIA COMA is the Medical Director and Business Development Director at Anaxomics, a biotech company specialized in the application of Artificial Intelligence to further understand the likely mechanism related to drug clinical responses.

She has a degree in Biochemistry, MsC in Experimental Biochemistry and Ph.D. in Health and Life Science. Previously she was a research Fellow at the Memory Unit of Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Barcelona, Spain and at MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. She has a wide experience in the application of Artificial Intelligence in biomedicine, preclinical testing  and quantifiable success in achieving revenue, profit, and business growth objectives.

 

Yannick Crow

The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Yanick Crow is a clinician scientist, with the work of the Crow group driven by an interest in human diseases and a determination to improve their diagnosis and treatment.

The laboratory works across two themes: one relating to Aicardi-Goutières syndrome (AGS) and other disorders associated with enhanced type I interferon signalling (the so-called type I interferonopathies); and the second dedicated to an understanding of the causes of calcium in the brain (intracranial calcification), with a particular focus on two rare genetic conditions - leukoencephalopathy with calcifications and cysts (LCC) and Coats plus.

 

Fatma Dedeoglu

Boston Children's Hospital, US

 

Karen Durrant

Autoinflammatory Alliance, US

 

Sophie Georgin-Lavialle

AP-HP, France

 

Raphaela Goldbach-Mansky

NIH, US

 

Lauren Henderson

Boston Children's Hospital, USA

Dr. Lauren Henderson is an Attending Physician in Rheumatology at Boston Children’s Hospital and an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She oversees the daily operations of the New-onset JIA Registry and the Rheumatic Diseases of Childhood Biorepository at Boston Children’s Hospital. In addition, she serves as the subcommittee chair for the CARRA (Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance) federated biorepository that includes more than 60 pediatric rheumatology sites in the US and Canada. Her research focuses on the role of regulatory T cells in the pathogenesis of juvenile idiopathic arthritis. 

 

Michael Hofer

CHUV - Switzerland

A specialist in pediatric immunology and rheumatology, Michaël Hofer focuses his clinical and research activity on rare inflammatory diseases in children and adolescents. Assistant physician in the Woman-Mother-Child Department at CHUV, he was promoted to associate professor at the Faculty of Biology and Medicine at UNIL on February 1, 2016.

Dan Kastner

National Human Genome Research Institute, USA

Dr. Dan Kastner obtained his A.B. summa cum laude in philosophy from Princeton University in 1973 and a Ph.D. and M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine by 1982. After completing Internal Medicine residency and chief residency at Baylor, Dan moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1985. He is currently the Scientific Director of the Division of Intramural Research of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Throughout his career at the NIH Dan’s research has focused on using genetic and genomic strategies to understand inherited disorders of inflammation, often stimulated by patients with relatively rare disorders seen at the NIH Clinical Center hospital. This work has provided detailed molecular explanations for these illnesses, has provided the conceptual basis for highly effective targeted therapies, and has informed our understanding of more common illnesses. Dan’s group also proposed the now widely accepted overarching concept of autoinflammatory disease to denote disorders of the evolutionarily ancient innate branch of the human immune system. Dan has won a number of awards and honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and to the National Academy of Medicine in 2012, recognition as Federal Employee of the Year in 2018, and the Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine in 2019.

Isabelle Koné-Paut

Head of Pediatric Rheumatology Dept, Kremlin Bicêtre Hospital, France

Professor Isabelle Koné-Paut is the head of a world-renowned pediatric rheumatology department at the Kremlin Bicêtre hospital, university of Paris Sud-Saclay. Her department has been awarded EULAR Center of Excellence 2015/2020 with the Adult Rheumatology Department (Pr Xavier Mariette). 

 

Helen Lachmann

University College London, United Kingdom

Dr. Helen Lachmann is Honorary Consultant Nephrologist  at University College London (UCL). She completed her Bachelor’s degree from University of Cambridge and M.D from University College London.

Dr. Helen Lachmann specialises in amyloidosis and auto-inflammatory diseases. She has published widely and her main scientific interests are focused on the phenotypic characterisation and treatment of acquired and hereditary forms of systemic amyloidosis and the genetics and management of inherited systemic auto-inflammatory conditions. 

 

Najoua Lalaoui

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia

 

Judy Lieberman

Boston Children's Hospital, US

Dr. Lieberman is a graduate of Radcliffe College. After earning a Ph.D. in physics from Rockefeller University, she was a high-energy physicist at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Later she earned an M.D. in the joint Harvard-MIT Program in Health, Science, and Technology, trained in internal medicine and hematology-oncology at Tufts Medical Center and was a postdoctoral fellow in immunology at MIT. In 2008, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Dennis Lo

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Dennis Lo is the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences, the Li Ka Shing Professor of Medicine and Professor of Chemical Pathology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Medicine of CUHK. Dennis Lo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge and the Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Oxford.

 

Kaplana Manthiram

National Human Genome Research Institute, USA

Dr. Manthiram is a Clinical Fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. She completed medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, her pediatrics residency at the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, and her pediatric infectious disease fellowship at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She is currently studying the clinical outcomes and biological mechanisms of periodic fever syndromes at NIH. During residency, she studied vaccine uptake and parental attitudes toward vaccination in an urban population in Chennai, India.   She is also a medical advisor for Healthy Children, Brighter Futures, a non‐profit organization which implemented an infant home visit program by nurses in rural India.

Luigi Notarangelo

NIH, Immune Deficiency Genetics Section, USA

Luigi D. Notarangelo received his M.D. from the University of Pavia, Italy. After completing training in pediatrics, subspecialty training in allergy/immunology, and human genetics at the University of Pavia and a postdoctoral internship with David Nelson, M.D., at the Metabolism Branch, National Cancer Institute, he was appointed associate professor and subsequently full professor of pediatrics at the University of Brescia, Italy, where he chaired the department of pediatrics between 2000 and 2006. In November 2006, he joined the division of immunology at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, as professor of pediatrics. In October 2016, he joined the Laboratory of Host Defenses.

Dr. Notarangelo is a leader in the study of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of human primary immune deficiencies and in the treatment of these disorders. He has served as president of the European Society for Immune Deficiencies and of the Clinical Immunology Society. He has received numerous national and international awards.

 

Luke O'Neill

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Luke O’Neill is Professor of Biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is a world expert on innate immunity and inflammation. His main research interests include Toll-like receptors, Inflammasomes and Immunometabolism. Professor O’Neill is co-founder of Sitryx, which aims to develop new medicines that target immunometabolism for inflammatory diseases.

 

Maria Cecilia Poli Harlowe

Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile

 

Boris Reizis

NYU Grossman School of Medicine, USA

 

Peter Robinson

The Jackson Laboratory, USA

Peter Robinson studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Columbia University and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed training as a Pediatrician at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany.  His group developed the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), which is now an international standard for computation over human disease that is used by the Sanger Institute, several NIH-funded groups including the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, Genome Canada, the rare diseases section of the UK's 100,000 Genomes Project, and many others. The group develops algorithms and software for the analysis of exome and genome sequences and has used whole-exome sequencing and other methods to identify a number of novel disease genes, including CA8, PIGV, PIGO, PGAP3, IL-21R, PIGT, and PGAP2. 

Sinisa Savic

University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Prof Savic leads translational research programmes focused on the discovery of molecular mechanisms which underpin the pathogenesis of primary immunodeficiencies (PID) and systemic autoinflammatory disorders (SAID), both hereditary and acquired. This includes the application of modern genetic techniques such as whole genome sequencing to aid the discovery of novel genetic causes, and the use of functional assays to determine the relevance of novel genetic variants on immune system function. 

 

Deborah Stone

NIH, USA

Marielle van Gijn

University Medical Centre (UMC) Groningen, Netherlands

Bas Vastert

UMC Utrecht, Netherlands

 

Kate Webb

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Dr. Kate Webb specialises in paediatric rheumatic conditions including juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) and juvenile onset systemic lupus erythematosus (jSLE), in addition to general paediatrics.

Dr Webb trained in paediatrics and paediatric rheumatology at the Red Cross Children’s Hospital at the University of Cape Town, with a Discovery Foundation sub-speciality fellowship. She was awarded a competitive Action Medical Research fellowship to complete a PhD at University College London, UCLH and Great Ormond Street Hospitals. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Sex and puberty influence the innate immune system type 1 interferon response’ which explored how sex and puberty associate with the onset of lupus in young females. She has published widely in the field and presented at international congresses.

Dr Webb returned to South Africa as there is a desperate shortage of paediatric rheumatology services for children locally. She maintains close ties to the paediatric rheumatology department at Red Cross Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Webb aims to provide a centre for excellence for young people with rheumatic disease and their families as well as perform ongoing research into the causes of these diseases.