Inger Jorid Berg received her medical degree at University of Oslo, Norway in 1996 and is a rheumatologist working at Diakonhjemmet Hospital in Oslo. In 2016 she defended her PhD on a work on ankylosing spondylitis and risk of cardiovascular disease. Now she works part time as a consultant rheumatologist and part time as a post doc researcher in the ReMonit study, which compares digital follow-up, self-monitoring and conventional follow-up of patient with axial spondyloarthritis.

Emre Bilgin is a rheumatologist at Hacettepe University where he is doing his MSc on epidemiology. His main interests are rheumatoid arthritis, adult Still’s disease and ANCA-associated vasculitis, aside from his enthusiasm for editorial activities. He is currently working of AI projects and their application into the field of Rheumatology.

Gerd R. Burmester, MD, is Senior Professor of Medicine and Rheumatology in the Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Freie Universität und Humboldt-Universität Berlin and consultant rheumatologist, Division of Rheumatology, MVZ endokrinologikum, partner practice of the Charité.

Professor Burmester earned his medical degree from Hannover Medical School and completed a residency at the Medical School of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University in New York and was a visiting scholar at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York.

Professor Burmester is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jan van Breemen Medal of the Dutch Society of Rheumatology and the Carol-Nachman Price for Rheumatology.  He serves on several editorial boards, including the Journal of Rheumatology and Clinical Rheumatology, and he is the Editor-in-Chief of RMD Open, official journal of EULAR (European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology). The author himself of more than 950 original and review articles, Professor Burmester’s research interests include rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis, immunotherapy, Lyme borreliosis, cellular activation mechanisms in inflammatory joint diseases, and tissue engineering.

Professor Burmester served as President of the German Society of Rheumatology from 2001-2002. He was a Member of the Executive Committee of EULAR from 2003-2006 acting as Chairman of the Standing Committee on Investigative Rheumatology and became an honorary member of EULAR in 2006. From 2011 – 2013 he served as Treasurer of EULAR, and he served as President of EULAR from 2015 – 201. Since 2017 he is President of the Board of Trustees, FOREUM Foundation for Research in Rheumatology. In 2019 he became Master of the American College of Rheumatology and in 2022 received the Meritorious Service Award in Rheumatology from EULAR. He became honorary member of the German Society of Rheumatology in 2022.

Dr Philip Hamann is a Consultant Rheumatologist at North Bristol NHS trust and Clinical Lecturer in Rheumatology at the University of Bristol and has been a Fellow of the Turing Institute. His research interests centre on using real world health data to help develop novel methods to monitor and manage individuals with rheumatoid arthritis remotely using remotely captured data. He has worked on data from the BSRBR-RA to investigate the predictors of response to anti-TNF. Dr Hamann conceptualised and developed an award-winning smartphone app and cloud-based software in collaboration with industry partners which allows patients to securely record and report rheumatoid arthritis disease activity using validated patient reported outcomes which is in clinical use in the NHS and has collected over 30,000 ePROMs to date.

Rachel Knevel is an ass. prof at the Rheumatology Department of the LUMC working as clinician and scientist. During her PhD she studied the genetics of phenotypic characteristics of rheumatoid arthritis. To further specialize in bioinformatics, she was a research fellow at the Raychaudhuri lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical school from 2016-2018. After that, she rejoined prof. Tom Huizinga’s Department of Rheumatology at the Leiden University Medical Centre, where she initiated her research group focusing on early disease differentiation and the identification of homogeneous subsets in patients with rheumatic disease by integrating the “big data” of electronic health records with genetic information

Hannah Labinsky is a resident in rheumatology who is now affiliated to the Rheumatology department in Würzburg after starting her residency in Erlangen. Together with Johannes Knitza, she studies the opportunities and barriers of telediagnostics and teletherapy, e.g. using digital therapeutics (DTx), to improve rheumatology care. Her special research interest is axial spondylarthritis (axSpA).

Dr Philp Riches graduated in medicine and immunology in 1999, and was appointed as consultant rheumatologist in 2010 in NHS Lothian. He completed a PhD in 2015 at Edinburgh University and is now the undergraduate Rheumatology lead and an Honorary Senior Lecturer. His publications include a description of a novel syndrome of osteoporosis in the New England Journal of Medicine, and a trial of supported gout self-management in The Lancet Rheumatology. He has received the Royal College of Physician’s Croom Lectureship, the BMA Foundation Doris Hillier Award, and an Innovation award from the British Society of Rheumatology.

Daniel H. Solomon, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Section Clinical Sciences in the Division of Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He holds the Matthew H. Liang Distinguished Chair in Arthritis and Population Health at the Brigham.  Solomon earned his BA and MD degrees at Yale University, MPH at Harvard University and completed his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in rheumatology at the Brigham.

His early work focused on the safety of NSAIDs and selective COX-2 inhibitors, and he continues to study analgesics. Solomon’s current research focuses on cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis, and he is the co-Principal Investigator on an NIH funded trial testing the effect of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) on cardiovascular disease, also known as the TARGET trial.  He also has several ongoing projects improving implementation of treat to target in rheumatoid arthritis, digital health technologies in rheumatology, and the safety of methotrexate.

He has published over 450 original articles and 100 editorials and book chapters, his articles have been cited over 100,000 times, and he has been PI on numerous NIH, foundation, and industry supported grants.  He is the current Editor in Chief of Arthritis & Rheumatology.  He has chaired the ACR Quality of Care Committee. As well, he has served as the Chair of the FDA Arthritis Advisory Committee. He is also the PI of the VERITY P30 Clinical Research Core at BWH which aims to improve clinical research in rheumatology. He has mentored over 40 trainees and been recognized with mentoring awards from Harvard Medical School, the American College of Rheumatology, and the Brigham. In addition to his investigative achievements, Solomon has a busy clinical practice and has played a special role in helping the Hispanic community and been instrumental in advancing the collaborative clinical Cardiovascular in Rheumatology Medicine practice at BWH.

Maya Zlatanova (hyperlink to LI profile) is the CEO and co-founder of FindMeCure (patient navigation platform) and TrialHub (data-intelligence platform for clinical trials). Her team and Maya are on a mission to bringing clinical research closer to patients by improving the way we design and conduct clinical trials according to patients needs and expectations. Maya is also the host of the podcast Trials with Maya Z where different experts discuss the challenges of clinical trials and how we can overcome them.  

Judith Safford trained as an economist (Dr. rer. pol) in Germany and has dedicated her professional life to excellence in non-profit management. Affected by spondyloarthritis and colitis since early adulthood, she is also a cancer survivor. Her special interest is the involvement of patients in healthcare, particularly through their participation in medical research. She is co-founder and President of the RheumaCura Foundation, which advocates for people-centred arthritis research. Furthermore, she is executive director of the SCQM foundation (Swiss national registry of inflammatory rheumatic diseases) and engages as a patient expert in research projects, including an SNSF funded project at the University Hospital of Zürich. She is a Fellow of the Sciana health leaders’ network and writes a blog at arthritisandme.ch. Exercise is essential to her health management, so she sneaks off to the Alps whenever time permits to tramp along a snowy mountain slope or scamper up a rock wall.

Julie Horan is a real-world evidence expert at UCB focusing on digital care transformation. She is merging her medical background with knowledge and experience in digital health and patient-generated health data. Her current work explores development, implementation and evaluation of patient-centred health technology collecting real-world data to help patients and clinicians better manage chronic diseases.

Diego Benavent is a consultant rheumatologist at Hospital Universitario La Paz in Madrid, where he is currently completing his PhD on axial spondyloarthritis. Additionally, he works as a Medical Expert at Savana, a company focused on applying artificial intelligence and natural language processing to medicine. In addition to his work on spondyloarthritis, Diego has participated in various healthcare technology projects related to patient-reported outcomes and patient management strategies. He is a member of ASAS and is the current chair of the Newsletter Sub-Committee in EMEUNET.

Professor Bart van den Bemt is clinical pharmacist, clinical pharmacologist and senior clinical scientist at the departments of Pharmacy in the Sint Maartenskliniek and the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Bart is medical manager of the in- and outpatient pharmacy of the Sint Maartenskliniek and head of Research and Innovation of the same hospital.

Due to his professional experiences as community-, clinical-, outpatient- and formula-pharmacist Bart has extensive experience of pharmacy practice, the development of (digital) pharmaceutical care programs and development of educational programs. Bart also founded a new Dutch bachelor course Pharmaceutical Consultant and is member of several committees/boards on pharmacotherapy, education, pharmaceutical care and outpatient pharmacy. Bart was president of the European Society of Clinical Pharmacy and vice-president of the Dutch Association of Hospital Pharmacy..

Bart’s research interests are focused on Personalized Pharmaceutical Care including medication adherence, e-health, medication review, therapeutic drug monitoring of biologicals, inflammatory pain, transitional care and medication wastage.

Christian Dejaco has studied Medicine and done a PhD in Innsbruck, Austria. He is currently the head of the Department of Rheumatology of the South Tyrol Health Trust and an Associate Professor at the Medical University of Graz.

Paco M.J. Welsing, PhD is a clinical Epidemiologist and HTA (Health Technology Assessment) expert at the department of Rheumatology & Clinical Epidemiology of the University Medical Center Utrecht (The Netherlands). He was trained in Biomedical Health Sciences at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands and received a Master of Science (MSc) in Epidemiology and in HTA in 2000. Subsequently he started working at the department of Rheumatology of the Radboud University Medical Center where he obtained his doctorate in 2005 mainly on clinical and health economic studies on the use of TNF-inhibiting drugs for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

Paco has experience in an academic setting, as researcher and teacher (Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Evidence Based Medicine and HTA), as well as in a pharmaceutical setting, as Manager Outcomes Research at Pfizer. His research interest lies in the optimal application of health interventions in daily clinical practice. Specifically prediction based decision aid using machine learning techniques and applications for implementation of decision aids. 

Apart from performing research himself he also has experience with consulting on study design and statistical analysis, writing of protocols and as a member of the Medical Ethical Review Board (methodologist) and Editorial Board (methodological/statistical adviser) for medical journals. Although he has experience in different therapeutic areas, most experience is in the field of Rheumatology.