Michael Beresford

Professor Michael Beresford is Brough Chair, Professor of Child Health at the University of Liverpool in the UK.

He is the Specialty Cluster Lead for the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network (CRN) responsible for the National Specialties of Children, Reproductive & Childbirth, Musculoskeletal, Ophthalmology and Hematology as well as Stratified/Personalized Medicine, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

Professor Beresford is Director of the UK’s only ‘Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centre for Children’ and Director of the ‘NIHR Alder Hey Clinical Research Facility for Experimental Medicine’.  He was Chair of the UK Pediatric Rheumatology Clinical Study Group from its inception for nine years, responsible for developing and overseeing a UK wide comprehensive portfolio of clinical trials and related studies covering the entire spectrum of diseases in pediatric rheumatology.

He is Executive member of the Pediatric Rheumatology European Society (PRES), Chairs the PRES SLE Working Party, UK JSLE Study Group and has developed an internationally renowned Childhood Lupus translational research program as part of the UK’s only Centre of Excellence for Childhood Lupus.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Fabrizio de Benedetti

Fabrizio De Benedetti received his MD, PhD from the University of Pavia where he trained as a Pediatric Rheumatologist . Since the end of 2003 he is at the Bambino Gesù Children Hospital in Rome where he serves, since 2010 as Head of the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology and the Head of the Laboratory of ImmunoRheumatology. His research is focused on the pathogenesis the role of inflammatory cytokines in pediatric rheumatic diseases. His research has been translated to the development of novel targeted therapies and in their clinical trials, with international lead of 10 phase II and phase III trials.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Daniel J. Lovell

Daniel J. Lovell, MD, MPH, is the Joseph E. Levinson Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and Clinical Director, Division of Rheumatology, at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Dr. Lovell’s clinical interests include the diagnostic evaluation and ongoing care of children with all pediatric onset rheumatic diseases while his research interests focus on clinical trials in children with rheumatic diseases, the methodology of clinical trials, and the mentoring of junior faculty.

He has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed publications, and numerous meeting abstracts, books, and book chapters on these topics. He has had NIH funding for over 20 continuous years.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Yukiko Kimura

Dr. Kimura is the Chief of the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at the Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s Hospital at Hackensack University Medical Center, Professor of Pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and of the Seton Hall University-Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, and the President of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) network.

Dr. Kimura has dedicated her career to improving the health, treatment and outcomes of children, adolescents and young adults with arthritis and rheumatic diseases. She has been a leader in research in these disorders, including being the Chair of the Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) Research Committee for CARRA, prior to her current position as President of the network. CARRA is a pediatric rheumatology research network with over 550 members and 140 academic pediatric rheumatology sites across North America. CARRA has been awarded over $65M in research funding. She is the principal investigator for several multi-center research studies being conducted to test the comparative effectiveness of CARRA consensus-based treatments for children and adolescents with JIA, including a recent $2.8M award from PCORI. She has also led the development and implementation of the CARRA Registry for pediatric rheumatic diseases, which has now enrolled more than 4,000 patients since July 2015. Data collected through the registry will answer many questions that are important to patients, families and health care providers alike, concerning the health and long-term outcomes of children with all pediatric rheumatic diseases, as well as the safety of all the new and effective medications now being used to treat these children.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–