Meet the Committee

Neil’s onset of arthritis at the age of three had a serious impact on his childhood. He focused most of his career on representing the interests of patients in the UK and Europe. In 2011 he set up Neil Betteridge Associates (UK), an international consultancy offering patient insight to organisations that support people with chronic pain, rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases and other long term conditions.

He is a long standing member of the EULAR Executive Committee, acting as EULAR's Liaison Officer for Public Affairs, and has previously been its Vice President, representing the patient group network PARE, twice.

Neil has been both a moderator and presenter at Societal Impact of Pain (SIP) meetings. He also sits on the International Co-ordinating Council of the Global Alliance for Musculoskeletal Health; acts as adviser to the European Alliance for Patient Access (EAfPA); Co-Chairs the Chronic Pain Policy Coalition; and is a Patient Adviser to NHS England on Specialised Pain Services. Formerly he was CEO of the UK patient group Arthritis Care; Chair of the UK umbrella body for MSK, ARMA; Strategic Adviser, British Society for Rheumatology; Patient Adviser, Royal College of Physicians; and has been a UK ministerial adviser on both health and disability issues.

Dr Didier Bouhassira (MD, PhD) has been trained in neurology and neurophysiology in Paris. He has been involved in both basic and clinical research on pain and is currently Director of Research at the National Institut for Health and Medical Research (Inserm). He is associate attending neurologist in the Pain Clinic at Ambroise Paré hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt and director of the laboratory of “Pathophysiology and Clinical Pharmacology of Pain” (Inserm U-987).

Didier Bouhassira was president of the French Pain Society (2013-2016) and is an active member of several international associations or societies. He is field editor for the European Journal of Pain and associate editor for several scientific journals including Pain. He has co-authored over 190 articles in peer reviewed journals and has written a number of book chapters devoted to the pharmacology and pathophysiology of pain.

Christopher Eccleston, PhD, is professor of medical psychology at the University of Bath in the UK where he directs the Centre for Pain Research. He established the Bath Pain Management Unit at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, including the first residential rehabilitation programme for adolescents with chronic pain.
Currently he is chair of the scientific Committee of the European Pain Federation, coordinating editor for the Pain, Palliative and Supportive Care Cochrane Review Group, is Senior Editor for Cochrane Brain, Nerves and Mind, and is psychology field editor for PAIN.

His main interest is in neuro-cognitive mechanisms of analgesia, innovative psychological treatments, embodied pain, evidence based pain management, and e-health. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles, with a career adjusted web of science h-index of 2.7. In 2016 he published ‘Embodied: The Psychology of Physical Sensation’ and in 2018 he published the edited volume ‘European Pain Management’, both with Oxford University Press. In 2018 he will present the Ronald Melzack Award Plenary Lecture at the IASP World Pain Congress.

Prof. Elon Eisenberg graduated from Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv
University in Israel. He completed a residency in Neurology, at Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, and Neurology - Pain Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA.
Prof. Eisenberg has been the director of the Institute of Pain Medicine at
Rambam Health Care Campus, Haifa, Israel, and the President of the Israeli Pain Association. He is currently the director of the Pain Research Unit at the Institute of Pain Medicine, Rambam Health Care Campus. He is a Professor of Neurology and Pain Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine and holds the Otto Barth Family Academic Chair in Biomedical Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His main areas of research include mechanisms and treatment of pain with special emphasis on neuropathic pain, CRPS, cancer pain, opioids and cannabinoids. Prof. Eisenberg has published about two-hundred articles, book chapters and abstracts in various areas of pain.

Nanna Brix Finnerup, MD, DrMedSc, is Professor and head of the Danish Pain Research Center, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark. Nanna Finnerup graduated from the Medical School at Aarhus University 1993, and after internship worked at the department of Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology at the University of Copenhagen. Since 1998 she has worked at the Danish Pain Research Center at Aarhus University. She obtained her degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences from Aarhus University in 2008, and is currently Professor at the Danish Pain Research Center.

Dr. Finnerup has authored more than 130 refereed publications. Her main research interest is the pathophysiology and therapy of neuropathic pain. Current research areas include spinal cord injury pain, chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain, painful diabetic polyneuropathy, postsurgical neuropathic pain, thermal sensory integration, neurophysiological assessment of pain mechanisms, placebo mechanisms, neuropharmacology, clinical trials, and systematic reviews.

Dr Finnerup is vice-chair of NeuPSIG, the neuropathic pain SIG of IASP and past president of the Scandinavian Association for the Study of pain (SASP). She is section editor of the journal PAIN. She has given a plenary lecture at the World Congress on Pain and the Sir Ludwig Guttman lecture at the International Spinal Cord Injury Society.

Dr Brona Fullen is an Associate Professor lecturer in University College Dublin’s School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sports Science, Ireland. She holds a BSc Physiotherapy (UUJ), MSc Healthcare (Acupuncture, UCD), and PhD (UCD) degrees.
Clinically Brona specialized in the topic of pain working in Pain services at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, St Vincent’s University Hospital and Tallaght Hospital Dublin.
In UCD she teaches in the area of pain science to both undergraduate and postgraduate students. She is Director of the MSc programmes in Advanced Physiotherapy Studies and Healthcare (Acupuncture). She is a co-Director of the UCD Centre for Translational Pain Research.
Her research areas of interest include the assessment and rehabilitation of people with chronic pain in a range of conditions including musculoskeletal dysfunction, obesity, and spinal cord injury. She has supervised MSc and PhD students to completion, and has presented her research at national and international meetings.
Brona is a past President of the Irish Pain Society (Chapter of the International Association for the Study of Pain), and the first Chartered Physiotherapist to be elected President-Elect of the European Pain Federation EFIC®.

Pierangelo Geppetti, MD, is professor of clinical pharmacology at the medical School of the University of Florence, Director of the Department of Health Sciences of the University of Florence, and Chief of the Clinical Unit - Headache Center and Clinical Pharmacology of the University Hospital of Careggi - Florence. He started his clinical and research activity at the at the Headache Centre of the Institute of Internal Medicine of the University of Florence under the guidance of Prof. Federigo Sicuteri, and spent three years (1991-1993) of research at the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and the Cardiovascular Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He has been Associate Professor (1998-2002) at the University of Ferrara, where he founded the local Headache Centre. He has authored more than 350 papers, with more than 18,000 citations and H Index 71. His scientific activity has addressed the role of primary sensory neurons and the neuropeptides, substance P and calcitonin gene related peptide (CGRP), in neurogenic inflammation, migraine headache and other types of pain. More recently, after an initial interest on the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel, he focused on the TRP ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) channel expressed by nociceptive neurons and Schwann cells in sustaining neuropathic chronic pain and migraine pain. 

I was born and raised in Wiesbaden/Germany and trained in Anaesthesia / Pain Medicine in Wuerzburg/Germany, and in the UK (Oxford, UCLH), and for post-trauma immunology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, US.
I work as Consultant in Pain Medicine at the Liverpool Walton Centre, and as Reader (associated Professor) in Pain Medicine at the University of Liverpool.

My research has focused on the role of the adaptive immune system in causing chronic pain. Based on our laboratory results, I have developed the idea of ‘autoantibody-pain’, a conceptual framework for explaining persistent Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), and additional severe primary chronic pains; I first proposed the concept of using passive transfer models to assess the contribution of IgG autoantibodies to chronic pain in 2004, have since established the first such model, and have led a group which has been successfully testing innovative immune-modulating treatments, particularly for the group of patients with longstanding CRPS. Our combined laboratory-clinical translational work has recently led to a first change in international guidelines, with the inclusion of CRPS as an indication into the ASFA guidelines for plasma exchange in 2016.

I have initiated, and have been leading the UK interdisciplinary CRPS Guidelines Group, under the Umbrella of the UK Royal College of Physicians, which has published its revised guidance in July 2018, endorsed by 29 UK professional organisations and Royal Colleges. I am Chair of the Special Interest Group ‘CRPS’ of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), and Chair of the European Pain Federation Task Force on CRPS.

In daily practice, I see patients at the Walton Centre, in secondary and tertiary outpatient clinics, Pain Management Program assessment clinics, and in operation theatres for neuromodulation trials. For my academic part, I also work as Director of the Liverpool Pain Research Institute – supporting Pain Research in the NW of the UK https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/pain-research-institute/.

Liesbet Goubert is Full Professor in the Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium (http://www.ghplab.ugent.be). She is interested in psychosocial risk factors for the development of chronic (pediatric) pain and in the interpersonal dynamics of (chronic) pain and chronic illness. More recently, she became very interested in the study of psychosocial resilience mechanisms that may account for the sustainment of adaptive functioning and well-being in the presence of pain.
She has published 145 peer-reviewed articles and 15 book chapters, which have 7230 citations (her h-index is 43). Her scholarly contributions have been recognized with several scientific awards, including the IASP-SIG Early Career Award in Pediatric Pain, the EFIC Grünenthal Grant Award and the Prize "Institut Belge de la Douleur-UPSA-Belgisch Pijninstituut". In 2017, she received the British Pain Society Medal in recognition for her outstanding contributions to the clinical science of pain.
She is a Council member of the IASP Special Interest Group on Pain in Childhood (2018 – 2023) and a member of the IASP/EFIC Global Year 2019 taskforce “Pain in the most vulnerable”. She has been the Scientific Chair of the 11th International Symposium on Pediatric Pain (2017, Malaysia) and the European Pediatric Psychology Conference (2018, Belgium). At the national level, she is a member of the scientific committee of the Belgian Pain Society and a member of the workforce Chronic Pain in Childhood of the Belgian Paediatric Pain Association.

Thomas Graven-Nielsen received a M.Sc.EE degree within Biomedical Engineering from Aalborg University, Denmark in 1994 and acquired his PhD within Biomedical Science and Engineering in 1997 (Aalborg University). In 2006 he obtained a Doctoral degree in Medical Science (Copenhagen University). He is Director at Center for Neuroplasticity and Pain (CNAP), SMI, Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark (since 2015), and Full Professor in Pain Neuroscience since 2008. The Danish National Research Foundation funds CNAP. Adjunct Professor at University at Western Sydney, Australia (since 2015), and Adjunct Professor at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia (since 2004). The research focuses on translational studies of musculoskeletal pain bridging the gap between basic animal findings and clinical manifestations of pain. The scope is to identify and modulate key features of human pain neuroplasticity leading to prevention of maladaptive neuroplasticity and promote advantageous neuroplasticity. Development of pain models, bio-markers, and assessment technologies are key biomedical tools for the translational studies. The core areas are muscle pain, joint pain, referred pain, localised and widespread deep-tissue hyperalgesia, pharmacological screening, and electrophysiological techniques to assess muscle pain physiology and neuroplasticity. He has published 300+ papers and reviews (260+ peer-reviewed, H-factor: 55) and received several awards. He reviews papers on a regular basis for high ranked journals, has presented as keynote speaker at several international conferences, and organised scientific workshops and symposia at international meetings. More than 10 national and international collaborations on translational pain research have been established including research groups in Sweden, UK, Japan, USA and Australia. Several international guest professors have worked with Dr. Graven-Nielsen in his laboratory facilities.

Frank Huygen is working as an Anaesthesiologist pain specialist in the University Hospital “Erasmus Medical Centre” in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Since 2009 he is appointed as full Professor in Anaesthesiology especially Pain Medicine at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is director of the centre of pain medicine. This centre is a multidisciplinary pain clinic specialised in acute, chronic benign and oncologic pain and palliative care (including the treatment of congenital and acquired spasticity with intrathecal Baclofen).

Frank Huygen is principal investigator of the Academic Centre of Pain Medicine (Erasmusmc ACE). He is especially interested in the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. In 2004, he received a PhD on writing a thesis titled “Neuroimmune alterations in the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome”. He is responsible for and/or participating in several research lines focussing especially on CRPS and neuropathic pain. He published > 150 peer reviewed articles.

He is involved in the education of medical students at Erasmusmc and responsible for the training of anaesthesia residents and anaesthesia fellows in pain medicine. He is responsible for the organisation of an education block on Neuromodulation in the master Technical Medicine at the Technical University in Delft.
He is Vice chair of the examination board of the FIPP examination of the World Institute of Pain. He is member of the editorial board of the journal “Painpractice”. He is member of the editorial board of “Evidence based Interventional Pain Practice: according to Clinical Diagnoses”. He is Chief editor of the ”Handbook pain medicine”.

He was involved in the organisation of several national and international symposia and congresses on pain. He is past elected president of the Dutch Anaesthesia Pain Society. He is chairman of the section Benelux of the WorId Institute of Pain. He is member of several (inter)national scientific advisory boards on pain medicine.

Frank Huygen is graduated as fellow of interventional pain practice in the world Institute of Pain in 2008. In 2011 he received the IASP research international collaboration grant. In January 2016, Frank Huygen received an honorary Fellowship in the Faculty of Pain Medicine in the College Anaesthetists of Ireland. Frank Huygen is appointed as member of the central disciplinary tribunal for healthcare in The Hague in January 2013.

Affiliation: Department of Pain Research and Treatment, Chair of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, Medical College, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Expertise: Magdalena Kocot-Kępska is a medical doctor, specialized in anesthesiology and intensive therapy. In 2009 she graduated from the two-year postgraduate studies “Pain Medicine” in Postgraduate Medical Training Centre of Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

In 2012 she defended the doctoral thesis and received the PhD title.

In 2017 she obtained the European Diploma in Pain Medicine.

Dr Kocot-Kępska works since 2001 in the Department of Pain Research and  Treatment, a multidisciplinary pain clinic specializing

in acute, chronic non-cancer and cancer pain, cooperating with Institute of Pharmacology of Polish Academy of Sciences. 

Dr Kocot-Kępska is involved in pre- and post-graduate teaching in the fields of pain medicine, anesthesiology and intensive care.

She is a lecturer at the Postgraduate Medical Training Centre of Jagiellonian University in Kraków and in courses of the European Committee for Education in Anesthesiology CEEA.

Since 2010 she is a member of International Advisory Board of EFIC “Change Pain”.

Publication history: Dr Kocot-Kępska has over 100 articles

published in scientific journals and has given over 100 lectures

at national and international congresses. She is also a co-author of the Polish textbooks on pain and national recommendations on pain treatment.

Societal responsibilities: Dr Kocot-Kępska is a secretary of the Polish Association for the Study of Pain (Polish Chapter of EFIC and IASP).

Since 2017 she is a Member at Large of Executive Board of EFIC.

She is also a member of national advisory boards and foundation on pain and is involved in the organization of several national and international symposia and congresses on pain.

Stephen McMahon is Sherrington Professor of Physiology at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He trained with Prof PD Wall at University College London and since then has run his own research laboratory in London.

His major research interest is pain mechanisms. He has a long-standing interest in identifying pain mediators and studying their neurobiological actions. He has worked extensively on the role of NGF (neutralizing antibodies now in multiple phase III trials), ATP acting at P2X3 receptors (receptor antagonists now in multiple phase II and III trials). His current research is focused on neuro-immune interactions, particularly the neurobiology of chemokines, and the genetics and epigenetics of pain.

Professor McMahon currently directs the Wellcome Trust Pain Consortium, and prior to this, the London Pain Consortium, a collection of leading pain researchers working to better understand chronic pain mechanisms and improve treatments. He was academic lead on a EU-IMI consortium called Europain, a collaboration of scientists working in academia and industry, 2009-2015. He is also deputy Chair of the MRC’s Neuroscience and Mental Health Board.

He has published more than 300 research articles in scientific journals including, Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Cell, Neuron and the Journal of Neuroscience and has an H-index of 102 (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=Qz9HihUAAAAJ&hl=en).

Kaare Meier received his medical degree from University of Southern Denmark in 2006 and his PhD from the Danish Pain Research Center, Aarhus University in 2012. He is currently employed as staff specialist at Department of Anesthesiology and Department of Neurosurgery at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.

His field of work is neuromodulation therapies for chronic pain, primarily spinal cord stimulation, and more recently also peripheral nerve stimulation for extremity pain and occipital nerve stimulation for cluster headache.

As the author of the only international database for neuromodulation therapies, he holds great interest in the economic and epidemiological aspects of neuromodulation, but he has also been active in animal research, clinical trials, and neurological studies of spinal cord stimulation.

Kaare Meier is the chairman of the Nordic Neuromodulation Society and a board member of the International Neuromodulation Society.

Bart Jan Morlion has been Head of the Leuven Centre for Algology (formerly the Multidisciplinary Pain Centre) at the University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, since 1999. He received his medical degree in 1988 from the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and subsequently trained in anesthesiology, intensive care medicine, and pain management at the Klinik für Anästhesiologie und operative Intensivmedizin, Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, where he was appointed head of the clinical research unit of the department in 1995.

In 1988 he moved to the University Hospitals Leuven, and in 2011 gained his PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the KU Leuven, where he was appointed as clinical professor in 2012. From 2006-2012 he has been the President of the Belgian Pain Society - the Belgian Chapter of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) - and during this period he represented Belgium as councillor in the European Pain Federation EFIC©. Since 2013 he is member of the executive board of the European Pain Federation EFIC© as president-elect and took office as president in September 2017 for a three-year term.

He is program director of the Belgian Interuniversity Postgraduate Studies in Pain Management and is also an active member of several committees of international scientific societies.

Professor Morlion teaches pain management, pharmacology and evidence-based medicine at KU Leuven and several international higher institutions, since 1999. He has given more than 450 international and national invited lectures and seminars on pain management and clinical nutrition, and has authored a number of primary manuscripts, reviews, books, and book sections. He is the deputy editor of the European Journal of Pain, and a regular reviewer for several international journals. His professional interests include all aspects of multimodal chronic pain management, analgesics, and quality management. His clinical research focuses on the pharmacological treatment of chronic pain and organizational aspects of multidisciplinary pain management.

André Mouraux (MD, PhD) heads a research group specialized in research on the physiology of the nociceptive system in humans, especially the cortical processes underlying the perception of pain. Using non-invasive functional neuroimaging techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), combined with novel techniques to selectively activate specific classes of nociceptive afferents (temperature-controlled infrared laser stimulation, mechanical pinprick stimulation, electric stimulation) and neuromodulation (transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation), he aims at better understanding the neural processes underlying the perception of pain, the plastic changes in nociceptive pathways that occur after inflammation, injury or sustained nociceptive input, and its involvement in the development of chronic pain. These approaches are also translated into clinical tools for the diagnosis and follow-up of chronic pain conditions (http://www.nocions.org).

Professor Osterbrink is a registered general nurse who specialised in intensive care and anaesthesia as a Registered Nurse Anaesthetist (RNA). He holds a Master’s degree in nursing and health promotion from the University of Glasgow (UK) and a PhD in public health and nursing sciences from the University of Leuven (Belgium). In 2010, he was awarded an Doctor of Humane letters honorary doctor's degree of the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA.

Since 2003, he has been Professor (Tenured) for Nursing Science at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA. In 2007, he became Professor and Dean of the Institute of Nursing Science and Practice at the Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg, Austria

Professor Osterbrink is a member of various national and international advisory boards for journals and educational and clinical initiatives. To date, he has published over 200 articles and book chapters. He is a member of the board of Directors of the ICN (www.icn.org) since 2013.  

His research focuses on health care research, in particular ‘pain management’ and the ‘standardisation of pain therapy’. He is Scientific Director of the German Pain Standard and Principal Investigator of a number of long-term research projects, such as the project ‘Schmerzfreie Stadt (pain-free city) Muenster’ (www.schmerzfreie-stadt.de) or ‘InTherAKT’ (www.intherakt.de).

Since January 2016, the PMU Institute of Nursing Science and Practice under the leadership of Prof. Osterbrink was granted the status of WHO Collaborating Centre for Nursing Research and Education.

Koen Paemeleire obtained his Medical Degree in 1995 at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He earned a PhD in Medical Sciences based on calcium signalling research with Professor Luc Leybaert at the Department of Physiology and Pathophysiology in Ghent and as a Fulbright Scholar with Professor Michael J. Sanderson at the Department of Physiology of the UMASS Medical Center, MA, USA.

He completed a five-year residency training programme in Neurology chaired by Professor Jacques De Reuck in Ghent. He trained in headache medicine with Professor Peter J. Goadsby at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London, UK. He works as a consultant neurologist at the Department of Neurology, Ghent University Hospital, Belgium since 2004, where he runs a specialized headache clinic. He was also appointed part-time Senior Lecturer in Neurophysiology at the Department of Basic Medical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium.

He served 6 years (2012-2018) on the board of the European Headache Federation and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Headache and Pain. His research focuses on the management of headache, neurostimulation techniques and migraine neurobiology. He is involved in multiple clinical trials testing CGRP (receptor) antibodies in the prevention of migraine and cluster headache.

Esther Pogatzki-Zahn is an anesthesiologist, pain specialist and full professor in the Department of Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care and Pain Medicine, University Hospital Muenster, Germany. Her main clinical work is pain management (acute, chronic and palliative) and she is head of the pain service at the University Clinic in Muenster since 13 years. Furthermore, she has been trained as a PhD in neuroscience (1998-2003) in the
US (Baltimore and Iowa City) and runs now a basic science research lab at the University of Muenster.

Her research group is aiming to provide insight into the neuropathology of incisional, chronic inflammatory, neuropathic and cancer related pain by using behavioral, electrophysiological and in-vitro studies in rodents and cooperates with other researchers in the field of omics and imaging. In addition, she is working with human surrogate models of postoperative and neuropathic pain and uses quantitative sensory testing (QST), imaging techniques and omics to explore acute and chronic pain in humans as well as chronic itch in volunteers and patients. Finally, she performs clinical studies and is involved in a number of international multicenter projects like Pain-Out, a large international acute pain registry.

She is member of the Prospect Initiative (www.postoppain.org) and the DFNS e.V.. Prof. Pogatzki-Zahn won a number of national and international research awards like the IASP Collaboration Research Award, the EFIC Grünenthal Grant (E-G-G) and the Clinical scholar research award 2006 of the IARS, among others. She is part of several “pain” boards including the SIG Acute Pain of the IASP (currently the Co-Chair) and the European Society of Anaesthesiologists (Chair of the Scientific subcommittee 8, acute and chronic pain and palliative care), Member of the scientific program committee for the IASP Congress in Yokohama (2017) and Boston (2019) and the board of the German Pain Society. She published more than 120 original peer reviewed manuscripts, 40 review articles/ editorials and 16 Book chapters (h-Index: 35, Web of science).

Professor of medical sciences Barbara Przewlocka obtained a doctor’s degree (Ph.D.) in Medical Biology from the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow. She was the head of the Department of Pain Pharmacology and currently is a Professor in this department and elected member of Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts. She has over 30 years of experience in pain research. Her research topic is pharmacology of pain mainly in the field of basic and clinically relevant aspects of mechanisms of opioid action, and she has published more than 200 original scientific publications and reviews. She was PI or co-investigator for over 20 national grants and 3 of the EU grants.

She is involved in the education of medical students at Medical Center for Postgraduate Education at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. She was involved in the organization of several national and international symposia and congresses (e.g IASP Congress in Milan 2012 and also many congresses of the Polish Association for the Study of Pain and Polish Neuroscience Society) and presently she is member of the Scientific Committee of the EFIC Congress in Valencia 2019, a chair of EFIC Working Group for Grants and Prizes and a chair of European Pain Federation EFIC Pain School in Krakow, Poland “Translational PainResearch: FROM LAB TO CLINIC”.

She is a laureate of many prizes, including the M. Kopernik Scientific Award of the Foundation of the City of Krakow in the field of medicine (2010); Medal of Jedrzej Sniadecki, by the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences (2009) and Tadeusz Browicz Award  by the Faculty of Medicine Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts (1998).

Barbara Przewlocka is a member of the scientific councils of the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw and Institute of Pharmacology in Krakow and a member of the committees of these councils, and she is a member of many international societies (IASP, EFIC, EOC, PTBUN, PTBB). She was the vice-president of the Polish Neuroscience Society and the Polish Association for the Study of Pain (Polish Branch of IASP). She is the editor-in-chief of the journal for clinicians and medical students in Poland "Bol", member of editorial boards of several journals, including Pharmacological Reports, Neuropeptides and Open Pain Journal and is a reviewer of manuscripts submitted for publication in leading journals in area of pain and neuroscience.

For more than 20 years I have been involved in chronic pain as a former CRPS patient and as Chair of the CRPS patient Society in the Netherlands and Chair of a patient society of 18 patient organizations (representing 40.000 patients) where chronic pain plays an important role. I have been involved in national and international research groups and participated in writing en developing the Evidence Based Guideline CRPS (2006 and 2014) and the Care Standard Chronic Pain (2017). I am also involved in the implementation of the Standard Chronic Pain in the Netherlands via Health Deal (regional ‘living labs’) to change the health care organization for chronic pain. For five years I am involved in improving pain management and registration of pain after surgery to get better care and cure in an academic hospital. I was a member of the Task Force CRPS from the EFIC and I am board member of the American CRPS Patient Society (RSDSA).

Thomas R. Tölle is a Professor of Neurology at the Technische Universität München, Germany. He is a neurologist and psychologist by training. He was formerly also appointed as Professor of Medical Psychology and Neurobiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He combines a basic and clinical research department with running a multi-disciplinary pain clinic.
He set up an interdisciplinary research group for clinical and experimental research into pain, focusing primarily on the neurobiological mechanisms of neuronal plasticity, pharmacological treatment and central imaging with fMRI and PET. His research and clinical interests also include the prevention and treatment of chronic neuropathic pain and he is the spokesman and runs the head office of the German Research Network for Neuropathic Pain (DFNS). He served as the president of the German IASP chapter and was chair the scientific program committee for the EFIC European Pain Congress in 2017 in Copenhagen. Currently, he is a member at large of the Executive Board of EFIC and chair of the committee for advocacy in the EXB.

He was also s plenary speaker on world congress of pain of IASP and worked in various task forces of IASP, has authored many peer-reviewed publications, participated in the development of various treatment guidelines and lectures on many aspects of pain medicine all over the world.

After passing for gymnasium, Rianne continued with Nursing on the higher professional educational level, being a student nurse in the Radboud university medical center. At the age of 23, she received her Bachelor of Nursing. Her job was offered immediately after her graduation in the department of General Internal Medicine and then at the Thorax / Heart Surgery department. After three years, she started nursing education specializing in intensive care nursing. After four years at the Intensive Care department, she accepted the position of clinical pain nursing consultant at the Department of Anesthesiology, Pain and Palliative Medicine. She is still working at this department and has since been employed as a nursing expert and is the hospital leader for the theme “Early Recognition and Treatment of Pain”. In this function, she is responsible for all aspects of pain in patients, such as protocols, work instructions, patient education, training programs, reports and quality improvement programs of individual departments.

In addition to clinical work, Rianne initiated the two-year post-graduate program for pain nursing consultant at the HAN University of Applied Sciences. She still coordinates this training and some other courses related to pain and palliative care at the HAN. Furthermore, she has accepted the assignment to promote research and evidence based practice and give these topics a more prominent place in the courses within HAN VDO.
In 2013 she won a personal scholarship, “NWO Promotion Grant for Teachers”, to start her PhD study on acute postoperative pain management in collaboration with the Radboud University Medical Center and HAN. In 2017 she successfully defended her PhD thesis called:
Improving postoperative pain care: an Acute Pain Service data analysis.

Danielle trained as an epidemiologist in Amsterdam (VU University medical centre, PhD 1997), and worked with the department of general practice for 10 years, developing a programme of research on the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of musculoskeletal disorders and other common conditions in primary care. In 2006 she took up a joint appointment in Amsterdam and Keele, with the aim to build on my international experience and develop an international programme of research across the two Centres. She gradually took up more responsibilities at Keele, being involved in both the epidemiology and trials programmes. Since October 2009 she is fulltime appointed at Keele (chair in primary care epidemiology) and has become part of the Centre’s executive management team. She coleads the Centre for Prognosis Research at Keele University and leads or contributes to several clinical research programmes.

As a methodologist, she has a strong interest in prognosis research, evidence synthesis and health economics. Her research addresses questions regarding pain phenotypes (definition, diagnosis, and classification of pain); understanding the prognosis of pain conditions, including predictors of long-term outcome and predictors of response to treatment; and the development and evaluation of models of stratified care. She has successfully supervised the completion of 20 PhD theses and has (co)authored >220 publications in international peer-reviewed journals (H-index Google Scholar: 70).

More details will follow.

Joyce van Meurs, PhD is a trained Biologist and acquired her PhD in Biomolecular Science at the department of Experimental Rheumatology (1999, Radboud University, Netherlands) She is currently associate professor at the Department of Internal Medicine of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands. Her research is focused on integrative genomics of osteoarthritis and chronic pain, where multiple molecular levels (variation in
DNA/RNA/metabolome/microbiome) are combined to find common biological mechanisms underlying disease. Results from these large-scale genomic studies are being pursued towards developments of (personalized) new treatments and prediction tools. She works with multiple large cohorts and is leading musculoskeletal research within the Rotterdam Study (a large longitudinal cohort study of >15.000 individuals). Dr van Meurs has a leading role in worldwide consortia studying integrative genomics (CHARGE-consortium and BIOSBBMRI, OA-genetics). In addition, Dr van Meurs coordinates the high-throughput human genotyping facility at Erasmus MC (HuGe-F; www.glimdna.org), which provides genomic services for many (inter)national customers. At present, the applicant has published over 200 peer reviewed publications, (H-index is 54); she reviews papers regularly for high profile journals, has received multiple awards, and is member of several (inter)national scientific (advisory) committees.

He also completed a postgraduate training in Health Law and Health Ethics at the University of Antwerp and wrote a thesis on “The scope and enforceability of practice guidelines”. He authored 86 publications in PubMed indexed journals. He was (co)author of 38 book chapters. He holds functions in the editorial board of several journals and is the past editor of the Dutch and English version of the guidelines “Evidence based interventional pain medicine according to clinical diagnoses”.

He is honorary treasurer of the World Institute of Pain (WIP) Jan Van Zundert is anesthesiologist, head of the Multidisciplinary Pain Centre of the Hospital Oost Limburg, Belgium. He is associate professor at the Maastricht University Medical Centre.

He obtained the doctoral degree in Medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and completed a 5 years residency in anesthesiology and reanimation at the University hospital Antwerp and specialized in pain medicine at the Radboud University Nijmegen.
He obtained his PhD at the Maastricht University with the thesis: “The use of pulsed radiofrequency in the treatment of chronic pain”. He followed a postgraduate training in Health Policy and management at the Catholic University of Leuven and wrote a thesis on “The treatment of (chronic) low back pain in a multidisciplinary pain center: effects and costs”.

More details will follow.

Chris Wells graduated in 1970 from Liverpool University. He trained in GP and anaesthesia, and was the first doctor in the UK to specialise solely in pain medicine in 1982. In 1983, he set up the first continuously-running Pain Management Programme in Europe at the Walton Centre, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. His clinical interests include the assessment and management of back pain and neuropathic pain. Dr Wells worked in North West England until he carried out his own Brexit to Portugal in 2016.

Dr Wells was a Council member of the British Pain Society from 1995 to 1999 and was Secretary from 2000 to 2002. He gave the Annual British Pain Society Lecture in 2008 and was made an Honorary Member of the Society that year. He started, with 2 others,, NeuPSIG, a Special Interest Group of IASP©. He was made one of 3 Honorary Members of this group in 2010.

Dr Wells was made an honorary member of IASP in 2016. He is also an honorary member of the Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Moldovan and Ukrainian Pain Societies. He was made a Citizen of Honour of Liverpool in 2016. He is a member of the recent NICE Guideline Development Group on low back pain and sciatica, completing the comprehensive report in 2016.

He is Vice-President of EFIC, The European Pain Federation. He initiated a multidisciplinary core curriculum in Europe, leading to a Diploma in Pain Medicine for all medical doctors, the European Pain Federation EDPM.

Harriët Wittink, PhD PT, is Professor and chair of the Lifestyle and Health research group, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her research interests are chronic pain (physiotherapy) management, exercise physiology and clinimetrics.
She has authored over a 100 book chapters, monographs, and scientific papers. She holds a Master of Science in Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine from the Institute of Health Professions at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Boston University. In addition to extensive clinical experience providing physiotherapy for patients with chronic pain, Prof Wittink is frequently an invited speaker at medical congresses, including the Royal Dutch Society for Physical Therapy (KNGF), International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists (IFOMPT) as well as numerous regional conferences and meetings. She participated in writing the cancer rehabilitation guideline and the movement intervention standard for people with chronic pain. She is a reviewer for several (pain) journals and served on the editorial boards of Pain; Clinical Updates (IASP) and Fysiopraxis.