Speakers
Professor Cliff Bailey
Cliff Bailey is Professor of Clinical Science at Aston University in Birmingham, England. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. He has been a Royal Society visiting scientist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a visiting scientist at Hanover Medical School in Germany. He has served on medical and scientific committees of Diabetes UK (formerly the British Diabetic Association), Society for Endocrinology, and European Association for the Study of Diabetes. Professor Bailey has held various editorial positions, including endocrine section editor of British Journal of Pharmacology and editorial board member of Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, LancetDE and Primary Care Diabetes. He is presently senior editor of Diabetes and Vascular Disease Research. He has been an expert witness for drug licensing authorities, regulatory agencies and other national and international review bodies. He received the 2013 Lunar Society medal and the 2015 Banting Lecture award. His research is mainly directed towards the pathogenesis and treatment of diabetes, especially the development of new agents to improve insulin action and reduce obesity, and the therapeutic application of surrogate beta-cells. He has published extensively with over 400 research papers and reviews, and four books.
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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.
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Professor Daniel Drucker
Dr. Drucker received his M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1980, and is currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Regulatory Peptides and the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre-Novo Nordisk Chair in Incretin Biology. His laboratory is based in the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mt. Sinai Hospital and studies the molecular biology and physiology of the glucagon-like peptides. Dr. Drucker’s scientific studies identified multiple novel mechanisms of gut hormone action, resulting in 33 issued US patents, and enabling development of new drug classes for diabetes, obesity and intestinal failure. His discoveries have been recognized by numerous learned societies including the Banting Award from the ADA, the Claude Bernard Award from the EASD, the Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research, the Rolf Luft Award from the Karolinska Institute, the Harrington-ASCI Prize for Innovation in Medicine, and election to Fellowship, the Royal Society, London.
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Professor I Sadaf Farooqi
Sadaf Farooqi is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally recognized Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie severe obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of human body weight regulation and obesity. With colleagues, she discovered and characterised the first genetic disorders that cause severe childhood obesity and established that the principal driver of obesity in these conditions was a failure of the central control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the basic mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit.
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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.
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Professor Nikolaus Marx
Nikolaus Marx, born in 1968, is Professor of Medicine / Cardiology and Head of the Department of Internal Medicine I, University Hospital Aachen, Germany. He received his medical training at the Universities of Mainz, Genf (Switzerland) and Düsseldorf, obtaining his MD in 1994. His thesis on growth regulation in human renal cancer cell lines was completed at the laboratory of Professor Gerharz at the Institute of Pathology, University of Mainz. After a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Peter Libby and Dr. Jorge Plutzky at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Nikolaus Marx later became a board-certified internist, then cardiologist, before specialising in intensive care medicine in internal medicine at the University of Ulm. He was appointed Professor of Medicine / Cardiology and Head of the Department of Internal Medicine I at the University of Aachen in 2009.
Professor Marx is a member of several organisations within the field of cardiology and diabetes, including the European Society of Cardiology, American Heart Association (AHA), German Diabetes Association and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. In addition to reviewing submitted manuscript to numerous journals, including Circulation, Diabetologia, Diabetes, Diabetes Care, the Journal of Immunology and The Lancet, he is currently Associate Editor for Diabetes and Vascular Disease Research. Professor Marx was awarded the Servier Young Investigators Award in 1999 at the First European Meeting on Vascular Biology and Medicine more recently was winner of the Poster Award Competition in Epidemiological Science at AHA 2002, the 2004 Morgagni Young Investigator Award as well as the Rising Star Award 2005 of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Professor Marx has served as President of the German Atherosclerosis Society (DGAF) from 2012 to 2015.
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Professor Neil Poulter
Professor Neil Poulter qualified at St Mary’s Hospital, London, in 1974, following which he trained in General Medicine. He then spent 5 years in Kenya co-ordinating a collaborative hypertension research programme at the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratories in Nairobi. On his return to the UK in 1985 he gained an MSc in Epidemiology with distinction at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Following this he was Co-PI of the WHO Oral Contraceptive case-control Study at University College London Medical School. In 1997 he was appointed Professor of Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at Imperial College London, where he is currently co-Director of the International Centre for Circulatory Health and Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit. He is an Honorary Consultant Physician and Epidemiologist at the Peart-Rose (CVD Prevention) Clinic based at Hammersmith Hospital, London, where he is actively involved in the treatment of patients with hypertension and related problems. He was President of the British Hypertension Society from 2003-2005 and is the immediate Past-President of the International Society of Hypertension. In 2008, he was elected as one of the Inaugural Senior Investigators of the NIHR and also elected as a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2009.
He has contributed chapters to several major textbooks and published over 460 papers in peer-reviewed medical journals, including co-authoring several sets of national and international guidelines. Professor Poulter is among the top 1% most cited academics in clinical medicine as reported in the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher 2014 report. He has played a senior management role in several international trials including the ASCOT, ADVANCE, EXSCEL, DEVOTE and LEADER trials; other research activities include the optimal investigation and management of essential hypertension and dyslipidaemia; the association between birth weight and various cardiovascular risk factors; the cardiovascular effects of exogenous oestrogen and progesterone; the prevention and aetiology of type 2 diabetes and abdominal aortic aneurism; and ethnic differences in cardiovascular disease.
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Professor David Wheeler
David’s current positions include Professor of Kidney Medicine at University College London, Honorary Consultant Nephrologist at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the George Institute for Global Health, Sydney, Australia. He is a Clinician Scientist with an interest in the complications of chronic kidney disease, specifically those that increase the burden of cardiovascular disease and/or accelerate progression of kidney failure. He has contributed to the development and running of several large-scale clinical trials involving patients with chronic kidney disease including SHARP, EVOLVE and CREDENCE. He is currently co-chief investigator of the DAPA-CKD study. Locally, he heads the clinical research team at the Centre for Nephrology, Royal Free Hospital in London. He has been involved in Clinical Practice Guideline Development for several organisations, most recently for Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO), of which he is currently co-chair. He has served terms as President of the UK Renal Association, Chair of the UK Renal Registry and Associate Editor of Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation (NDT).
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Professor Paul Zimmet
Professor Paul Zimmet is Professor of Diabetes, Monash University and Director Emeritus, Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, and Honorary President of the International Diabetes Federation. He has an outstanding international record in diabetes and obesity research, particularly in epidemiology and public health, research that predicted then charted the evolving global type 2 diabetes epidemic. His genetic studies with Professor Greg Collier, at Deakin University and epigenetic research at Baker IDI Monash with Professor Assam El Osta have led to important understanding of mechanisms in diabetes and obesity. He co-led the Monash team to develop the first laboratory anti-GAD test for predicting type 1 diabetes, now used throughout the world. He has published over 890 papers and listed in both the 2015 and 2016 Thomson Reuter’s “Worlds-Most-Influential-Scientific-Minds”. His many international and national awards include the Kelly West and Harold Rifkin Medals (American Diabetes Association), the Kellion Award (the highest scientific recognition of the Australian Diabetes Society), Banting Award (Diabetes UK) and the Professor A.M. Cohen Memorial Award and Lecture, EASD in Jerusalem in 2000.
In 2010, he received the Grand Hamdan International Prize for Medical Sciences and, in 2013, he was awarded the Peter Wills Medal from Research Australia recognising an Australian who has made an outstanding contribution to building Australia’s international reputation in the area of health and medical research. In 2015, he gave the Howard Florey Memorial Oration at the University of Adelaide and in 2016, he gave the Jeffery Cheah Distinguished Speaker Lecture at Malaysia’s Sunway University. He is Co-Director with Professor Naftali Stern at the newly established Sagol Center for Epigenetics of Metabolism and Aging at the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Tel Aviv.
He is an International Member of the Spanish Royal National Academy of Medicine and holds Honorary Doctorates from Madrid’s Complutense University, Monash University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Adelaide. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for distinguished services to medicine, nutrition and the biotechnology industry. He was Co-Chair of the Australian Government’s National Diabetes Strategy Advisory Committee for the development of the 2016-2020 Strategy.
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The fixed costs of the meeting (Venue hire, AV, food & beverage, speaker fees etc.) are underwritten by Pharmaceutical Industry. Supporters are listed here.
