Keynote & Invited Speakers
Read about our Keynote & Invited Speakers below:
Professor Eric Morand
Head of the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health
Monash University, Melbourne AUS
Eric is a clinical rheumatologist, and Head of the Monash Health Rheumatology Unit, the largest in Australia. He specialises in research and clinical care of systemic lupus erythematosus, as well as complex rheumatic diseases and rheumatoid arthritis. He is founder of the Monash Lupus Clinic, Australia’s largest research-grounded clinic for patients with SLE, a founding member of the Australian Lupus Registry & Biobank, and Chair of the AsiaPacific Lupus Collaboration.
His lab at Monash has studied the biology of glucocorticoids in rheumatic disease and lupus since 1996.
Professor Michelle Petri (virtual presentation)
Professor of Medicine Director, Lupus Center
John Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland USA
Michelle Petri MD MPH pursued her medical degree at Harvard University, then completed her medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Rheumatology fellowship at UCSF and joined Hopkins in 1986. She then obtained her MPH at the Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.
She is the director of the Hopkins Lupus Center and Professor of Medicine.
The Hopkins Lupus Cohort is a longitudinal cohort of SLE patients funded by NIH; it currently includes over 2,000 patients. The major outcome measures are prediction of disease activity, prevention of organ damage, and improvement in quality of life. The cohort has made important contributions to the understanding of corticosteroid toxicity in SLE, the preventive role of hydroxychloroquine and the pathogenesis of accelerated atherosclerosis.
Professor Georg Schett
Vice President Research
FAU (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität), University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Prof. Dr. Georg Schett was born in 1969 and studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where he completed his doctoral degree in 1994. He worked as an assistant at the Research Institute for Biomedical Aging Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences until 1996. Afterwards he completed his speciality training for internal medicine at the University of Vienna in 2001, before becoming a specialist physician and then a senior physician in 2004. He completed his habilitation in internal medicine in Vienna in 2003. In 2004, he was a visiting researcher at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, USA and qualified as a specialist in rheumatology in the same year. In 2006, he accepted an appointment at the Chair of Internal Medicine at FAU and is also director of the Department of Medicine 3.
Dr Jacqui Clark
Registered Specialist Pain Physiotherapist
Pains & Brains, Tauranga
Dr. Jacqui Clark holds a joint-PhD through Manchester Metropolitan University UK and Vrije Universitei Brussel, Belgium. She is a Specialist Pain Physiotherapist, registered with the New Zealand Board of Physiotherapy.
Her expertise is in persistent pain, sensory and movement dysfunctions, symptoms associated with changes in the way the brain processes sensory information, fibromyalgia and stress – and anxiety-related functional difficulties; and more.
As an active member of the Pain in Motion international research collaboration lead by Professor Jo Nijs, Jacqui is a post-doctoral researcher in chronic pain with Vrije Universitei Brussel, Belgium. She is an international post-graduate teacher and lecturer in the area of complex pain conditions.