Speakers
Professor Rachel Batterham
Professor Rachel Batterham is Professor of Obesity, Diabetes and Endocrinology at University College London (UCL). She holds a prestigious National Institute of Health (NIHR) Research Professorship (2016-2021). She established and leads the University College London Hospital (UCLH) Bariatric Centre for Weight Management & Metabolic Surgery. She leads the UCL Centre for Obesity Research within the Department of Medicine and is the Director for the UCLH/UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centre Obesity Research Theme.
Professor Batterham laboratory’s research is focused on increasing our understanding of body weight regulation and developing new therapies for the treatment of patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes. She has received several international awards including the RSM Steven’s Lecture (2018) Andre Mayer award from the World Obesity Federation (2016), the Diabetes UK Rank Fund Nutrition Prize (2015), the Lilly Scientific Achievement Award from The Obesity Society (2014), and the Linacre Medical from the Royal College of Physicians (2010).
Professor Batterham has made significant clinical contributions to defining the management of obese patients through her membership of the NICE Obesity Guideline Development Group and Royal College of Physicians Advisory Group on Health and Weight. Professor Batterham is currently a NICE Clinical Expert (2016-2021), Scientific Chair for the International Federation for Surgery for Obesity and Metabolic Diseases (IFSO) European Chapter (since 2015), a Trustee for the Association for the Study of Obesity (since 2016) and Council Member for British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (since 2016). Professor Batterham is passionate about reducing the stigma that people with obesity experience and ensuring that the patient voice is heard and has established a charity for people affected by obesity, Obesity Empowerment Network UK.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Nigel Brunskill
Nigel Brunskill graduated MBChB from University of Leicester School of Medicine in 1984 and subsequently trained in nephrology in the UK and USA. He has held research fellowships from both MRC and Wellcome Trust and gained a PhD in Renal Cell Biology in 1997. As an active clinical academic he has been Honorary Consultant Nephrologist for University Hospitals of Leicester (UHL) NHS Trust since 1997 and University of Leicester Professor of Renal Medicine since 2006. His research interests are in the cellular mechanisms of proteinuria and progressive kidney disease, clinical studies of chronic kidney disease and acute kidney injury in the community, and clinical interventions to mitigate adverse aspects of kidney disease in primary care.
He is Director of Research and Innovation for UHL NHS Trust and University of Leicester Lead for Clinical Research. He is Co-Chair of the UK Kidney Research Consortium Chronic Kidney Disease Clinical Study Group and is Director of the NIHR Leicester Clinical Research Facility.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Dr Kevin Fernando
Kevin Fernando is a part-time GP Partner & GP Educational Supervisor working at the coalface in North Berwick Health Centre, near Edinburgh. Kevin is Scottish lead of the Primary Care Diabetes Society. Other roles include RCGP Clinical Advisor for Diabetes & Multimorbidity and also Education Director for GPNotebook Education – a new series of primary care update courses in conjunction with GPNotebook. Kevin is also on the Diabetes Editorial Advisory Boards for Medicine Matters and Guidelines in Practice.
Kevin is an alumnus of the Diabetes UK Clinical Champion programme and was previously a writer and presenter for the NB Medical Education GP Update Hot Topics courses. Kevin was a keynote international speaker at the Primary Care Diabetes International Symposium, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia during November 2016 to celebrate World Diabetes Day and was invited to the Queen’s Garden Party at Holyrood Palace during July 2017 for his contributions to diabetes care in the UK.
Kevin has a number of publications in peer-reviewed diabetes journals most recently a review of SGLT2 inhibitors in type 2 diabetes management and his MSc thesis was a systematic review exploring the reversibility of type 2 diabetes with very low calorie diets.
Kevin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2000 and holds both MRCGP and MRCP(UK) qualifications and has completed a Master’s degree in diabetes which he passed with distinction. Kevin has been elected to Fellowship of the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and also the Academy of Medical Educators for his work in diabetes and medical education.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Miles Fisher
Miles Fisher graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1979. He received his MD in 1988 for his thesis on ‘Evidence for a diabetic cardiopathy.’ He has been a consultant physician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary since 2001. In 2010 he was made an Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow. He was a Vice-President (Medical) of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow from 2011-14, was the President of the Scottish Society of Physicians for 2015-16, and Co-chair of Scottish Heart & Arterial disease Risk Prevention (SHARP) in 2017.
He was on the steering committee of the DIGAMI 2 study and was the Scottish co-ordinator. He was an events adjudicator for the HOPE, HOPE-TOO, and cardiovascular outcome trials, and for the albiglutide Harmony phase 3 development programme. He has been involved in guideline development for the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and in guideline reviewing for SIGN, ESC, European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) & NICE.
He has interests in diabetes and the heart, hypoglycaemia, and new treatments for diabetes. He is the editor or co-editor of four books on heart disease in diabetes, three books on hypoglycaemia, and a book on SGLT2 inhibitors. He is the author or co-author of 49 book chapters, 81 original papers, 70 review articles, 33 leaders and editorials, 52 drug notes for Practical Diabetes and 15 drug notes for the British Journal of Cardiology. He was the co-author of the diabetes chapter in the 19th, 20th and 21st Editions of Davidson’s Principles and Practice of Medicine.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh
Sir Bruce has had a distinguished international career as a cardiac surgeon. He held the chair of Cardiac Surgery at University College London before being appointed Medical Director of the NHS in the Department of Health in 2007 and National Medical Director of NHS England between 2013 - 2018. For a decade he was the professional lead for doctors in the NHS and was responsible for national clinical policy and strategy, and promoting quality, clinical leadership and innovation across the service. In the Department of Health he was the sponsor for NICE, the Healthcare Commission and the National Patient Safety Agency.
He has a longstanding interest in the measurement of clinical outcomes and served on the boards of the Commission for Health Improvement and Healthcare Commission between 2002-2007. He was knighted for services to medicine in 2003 and in 2014 was named by the Sunday Times as one of Britain’s 500 most influential people. He became Chair of the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust in 2018.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Michael Lean
Mike Lean MA, MB, BChir, FRCP (Edinb), FRCPS (Glasgow), FRSE holds the Glasgow University chair of Human Nutrition, based at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he is also a consultant physician with NHS responsibilities for an acute medical ward and emergency receiving duties. His primary training was in Medicine, completing a Cambridge MA degree in History and Philosophy of Science. Medical undergraduate training was at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and postgraduate training mainly in Aberdeen and Cambridge. He received research training as an MRC Clinical Scientist for 4 years at the MRC and University of Cambridge Dunn Nutrition Laboratories, and on a Leverhulme Scholarship to the University of Colorado in Denver, in 2003. He has held Visiting and Adjunct Professorships at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen; the University of Otago, New Zealand (currently) and at University of Sydney, Australia (also currently). He has been a non-executive director of the Health Education Board of Scotland for 8 years, and chaired the Food Standards Agency Advisory Committee on Research. He was awarded the Rank Nutrition lectureship by Diabetes UK in 2013; the Tenovus Medal in 2017 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018.
Professor Lean has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers. H-Index (November 2017) = 95 (60 since 2012). Visit his Google Scholar page. His research, and related PhD training programmes, encompass the wide range of molecular, clinical and public health aspects of Human Nutrition, a body of integrated sciences underpinning all biomedical and health research. In 2014 he was one of only 19 Scottish researchers in the top 1% of their fields world-wide for international citations, on the Thomson-Reuters ‘Highly Cited’ Researcher listing. He is PI for the Diabetes Remission Clinical Trial, the largest research programme ever funded by Diabetes UK.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Dr Sarita Naik
Sarita Naik graduated from Nottingham University Medical School and completed specialist training in diabetes and endocrinology in centres along the south coast before taking up her post at University College Hospital in 2013. She has an interest in type 1 diabetes, insulin pump therapy and currently leads the diabetes antenatal service. She also works closely with Camden and Islington CCG to provide better integrated care for people with diabetes in the community. Sarita obtained an MD in 2012 looking at structured education and psychosocial distress in type 1 diabetes. She undertook further research at Yale University looking at pharmacological treatments for hypoglycaemia in type 1 diabetes and using functional MRI.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Kausik Ray
Kausik Kumar Ray is currently Professor of Public Heath, Deputy Director of Imperial Clinical Trials Unit and Head of Commercial Trials within the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, School of Public Health, Imperial College London and Consultant Cardiologist. Professor Ray received his medical education (MB ChB, 1991) at the University of Birmingham Medical School, his MD (2004) at the University of Sheffield, a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and finally an MPhil in epidemiology (2007) from the University of Cambridge.
A Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the Royal College of Physicians, Kausik Ray is also a member of the British Cardiovascular Society and European Atherosclerosis Society also serving on the EAS Consensus panel and EAS Executive Committee. Professor Ray has either been the National Lead Investigator, Principal Investigator, or served on committees for several major medical trials, as well as international registries and is currently involved in 8 ongoing trials in lipids and diabetes and the PI for ORION 1, 3, 11 assessing PCSK9 inhibition through RNA interference and BETONMACE assessing BET protein inhibition in patients with ACS.
Professor Ray’s research interests have focused on the prevention of coronary disease with a focus on lipids, diabetes, biomarkers and risk prediction. He has an H index of 66, an i10 of 149 and over 50,000 citations for his work in journals such as New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, European Heart Journal, Circulation and JACC. Key original contributions which have influenced European and American guidelines include demonstrating the early benefits of statin therapy post ACS, the impact of more/less intensive glycaemic control on CVD and the risks/benefits of aspirin therapy in primary prevention. Recently, his work on statins and diabetes risk led to a global label change for statins by the FDA and EMEA. Currently Professor Ray leads the EAS FH Studies collaboration which is the first global registry of FH and includes 68 countries, as well as being the Senior PI for the TOGETHER study looking at cardiometabolic risk in the vascular health checks in 250,000 people in London.
Return to Top of Page - Return to Programme
Professor Anita Simonds
Anita Simonds is a Consultant in Respiratory & Sleep Medicine at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust and Professor of Respiratory and Sleep Medicine at NHLI, Imperial College, London. She runs the Sleep & Ventilation service responsible for around 11,000 patients on Continuous positive airways pressure therapy (CPAP) for Obstructive sleep apnoea, and 2000 adults and children using home ventilation. Her reach interests are sleep disordered breathing, and respiratory support. She is Clinical Lead for NICE Guidelines on Obstructive sleep apnoea hypopnea syndrome, obesity hypoventilation and overlap syndrome due to be published in 2020, editor of ERS Handbook of Respiratory Sleep Medicine and Vice President of the European Respiratory Society.
Support
The fixed costs of the meeting (Venue hire, AV, food & beverage, speaker fees etc.) are underwritten by Pharmaceutical Industry. Supporters are listed here.
