Oliver Distler is Professor of Rheumatology and Chairman of the Department of Rheumatology at the University of Zurich. He is also heading the Center of Experimental Rheumatology of the University of  Zurich. The Department of Rheumatology has been awarded a EULAR Center of Excellence due to its scientific achievements. With over 300 primary research papers, over 21`000 citations and an HFactor of 73, he is among the top 3 cited researchers worldwide in the field of systemic sclerosis. His
research activities span from a preclinical program focusing on the characterization of key molecules and intracellular signaling cascades driving the disease process to a translational and clinical program with emphasis on precision medicine and phase 2/3 clinical trial design.

Prof von Garnier is a pulmonologist and expert in severe obstructive pulmonary diseases, lung cancer and interventional bronchoscopy.

Prof von Garnier is the chairman of the Division of Respiratory Medicine and full professor at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV).

As president of the Swiss Society for Pulmonology, he has been involved in coordinating its response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and is involved in the care of individuals suffering from long-term complications of COVID-19. He has recently published on the management of asthma, COPD, and lung cancer during COVID-19, as well as on pulmonary embolism and respiratory sequelae in COVID-19 patients.

Jan Felix Drexler is Head of the Virus Epidemiology group and an Associate Professor at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Following medical education in Germany and Brazil, he worked as a staff scientist and professor in Brazil, Germany and the Netherlands. His group focuses on the evolution and epidemiology of emerging viruses at the animal-human interface. Since 2006, he has published 185 peer-reviewed papers, accumulating >6000 citations, an h-index of 41 (Web of Science) and about 10.5 million € extramural funding.

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Prof. Alain Schoepfer is heading the outpatient clinics of Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in CHUV He performed his GI fellowship in Lucerne and Inselspital Ben and did a post-doc fellowship at the Farncombe Family Digestive health research Institute at McMaster University in Canada.  His clinical and research interests are focused on inflammatory bowel diseases  and eosinophilic gastrointestinal diseases. He serves as principal investigator of the Swiss EoE cohort.

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Prof. Michaël Hofer is a Pediatric Immunologist and Rheumatologist, working at the University of
Lausanne, Switzerland; he is leading the Pediatric Immuno-rheumatology Service of Western Switzerland that offers decentralized consultations in 5 different sites, among them the University
Pediatric departments of Lausanne and of Geneva.
Pediatric inflammatory rheumatisms, including auto-inflammatory syndromes, are at the heart of Michaël Hofer’s clinical and research activity. He has established an international cohort for
Juvenile Inflammatory Rheumatisms (JIRcohort) to determine patients’ long-term outcome and the
tolerance of the treatments. He has been actively involved in numerous clinical studies, both
nationally and internationally, and he was recently co-chairing the consensus conference to propose
evidence-based classification criteria for monogenic autoinflammatory diseases PFAPA. He
focused his research activities mainly on the study of auto-inflammatory diseases and in particular
PFAPA (Periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis and adenitis syndrome) and systemic
juvenile idiopathic arthritis.
Since 2016, he is organizing an international Winterschool on Juvenile Inflammatory rheumatisms
in the Swiss mountains; this year the event is dedicated to pediatric vasculitis and will be virtual.
Michaël Hofer is a member of several scholarly societies, including the International Society of
Systemic Auto-Inflammatory Diseases, and the Swiss Pediatric Society, where he served as
President; currently, he is the President of the French Society of Pediatric Rheumatology
(SOFREMIP) and was Secretary of the Pediatric Rheumatology European Society (PReS)

Professor Bachelez is professor at the Department of Dermatology of the Saint-Louis University Hospital in Paris, France. Since 2004, Professor Bachelez has been full professor of clinical dermatology at the Université Paris-Diderot/Université de Paris, where he received his Ph.D. in immunology in 1999. Professor Bachelez’s clinical and scientific research focuses on immunogenetics of inflammatory skin diseases at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) at the Imagine Institute in Necker Hospital. His areas of scientific interest include molecular mechanisms of psoriasis and psoriasis-related diseases, and other immune-mediated and inflammatory skin diseases. Professor Bachelez has received several scientific awards, including the Robert Degos award. He is a member of several national and international scientific societies, including the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology and the European Dermatology Forum (EDF). He is a board member of the International Psoriasis Council, and general secretary-Treasurer-elect of the European Society for Dermatological Research (ESDR).

Professor Bachelez has published more than 230 manuscripts in peer-reviews journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Arthritis and Rheumatism as leading author.

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Fadi Fakhouri is an adult nephrologist and a clinical researcher. He has a long-standing interest in autoimmune renal diseases, particularly complement-mediated nephropathies. He has conducted several clinical and experimental studies in the field of thrombotic microangiopathies, C3 glomerulopathy and other membrano-proliferative glomerulonephritis.

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Prof. Conrad is head of policlinic and the centre for psoriasis at Lausanne University Hospital. He participated at the prestigious Postgraduate Course of Experimental Medicine and Biology at the University of Zurich. After his dermatology training in Zurich and postdoctoral research at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, he returned to Switzerland. Prof. Conrad has received several scientific awards for his basic and translational research on innate and adaptive immunity in inflammatory skin diseases, focusing on psoriasis. He has numerous publications in journals such as Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, and Journal of Immunology, and more than 3500 citations. He has been principal investigator for multiple preclinical and clinical trials in psoriasis and serves as external scientific expert for several international societies and foundations and is an elected councilor of the International Psoriasis Council, IPC.

Jonathan Kay, MD

Professor of Medicine and Population & Quantitative Health Sciences

Timothy S. and Elaine L. Peterson Chair in Rheumatology
Director of Clinical Research, Division of Rheumatology

University of Massachusetts Medical School

Worcester, Massachusetts

Biographical Sketch

Jonathan Kay, MD, is Professor of Medicine and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences and holds the Timothy S. and Elaine L. Peterson Chair in Rheumatology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, where he directs Clinical Research in the Division of Rheumatology and is Associate Director of the MD/PhD Program. His clinical appointment is as a Physician at UMass Memorial Medical Center, also in Worcester. He received his medical degree from the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, California. He then completed an internship and residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and fellowships in rheumatology and immunology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Dr. Kay is a Fellow of the American College of Rheumatology and of the American College of Physicians.  In 2018, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the American College of Rheumatology and he was awarded honorary membership in EULAR.  He is an ad hoc reviewer for many journals and a member of the editorial board of RMD Open.

Dr. Kay’s clinical interests span the spectrum of rheumatic diseases, with special interest in rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthropathies, and other forms of inflammatory arthritis.  He was a member of the group that developed the 2010 ACR/EULAR Diagnostic and Classification Criteria for Rheumatoid Arthritis.  He chaired the Rheumatology Working Group and was a member of the Internal Medicine and Musculoskeletal Topic Advisory Groups for the World Health Organization in its Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11.

Over the past three decades, his clinical research has focused on nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (formerly known as nephrogenic fibrosing dermopathy), b₂-microglobulin amyloidosis, and other rheumatologic problems of patients with chronic kidney disease.  He has been a principal investigator on over 60 clinical trials of novel therapies for rheumatoid arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, gout, and osteoarthritis.  Over the past decade, he has been involved in the development of biosimilars to treat rheumatic diseases.  Dr. Kay lectures internationally and is the author of more than 240 publications and book chapters.