Meet the #EFIC2023 Scientific Programme Committee

Esther Pogatzki-Zahn is full professor in the Department of Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care and Pain Medicine, University Hospital Muenster, Germany. Currently where she works as a pain specialist and principle investigator of the “Translational Pain Research Group”. Her research is aiming to provide insight into the neuropathology of postsurgical, chronic inflammatory, neuropathic and cancer related pain by using basic science in-vivo behavioral, electrophysiological, omics, optogenetic, fMRI and molecular methods as well as human translational pain studies. Furthermore, she performs clinical pain-related studies encompassing a bio-psycho-social spectrum and is involved in many international multicenter projects, for example IMI-PainCare (www.imi-paincare.eu/), One additional research focus are systematic reviews and meta-analysis related to pain, regional anesthesia and perioperative medicine (pre-clinical and clinical data) including methods to improve their methodology/design. Currently, her research is supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) and the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI). She is council member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), board member of the German Pain Society, chair of the Acute Pain SIG of the IASP, past chair of the subcommittee “Acute and Chronic Pain and Palliative Medicine Pain Management” of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC), member of the research committee of the ESAIC and member of the European Society of Regional Anaesthesia & Pain Therapy (ESRA) PROSPECT group (https://esraeurope.org/pain-management/), member of the European Pain Federation (EFIC) Translational Research Group and member of the Pain, Palliative and Supportive (PAPAS) Cochrane Group (https://papas.cochrane.org/). She is Deputy Editor in Chief for the European Journal of Anaesthesiology and editorial board meber/reviewer for many international peer review journals. She published more than 160 original peer reviewed manuscripts, 50 review articles/ editorials, 16 Book chapters and 3 books (h-Index: 37, Web of science).

Audun Stubhaug is professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at University of Oslo and is Head of Department of Pain Management and Research at Oslo University Hospital, Norway. He has been combining clinical work and pain research for several decades. He is currently involved in research within pain epidemiology, as well as clinical studies and human experimental studies.  He is engaged in developing clinical registers and the documentation of societal impact of pain and developing cost-effective treatments. He has published 200 articles and book chapters in the pain field and is currently president of the Norwegian IASP-chapter.   

Catherine Doody is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health Physiotherapy and Sports Science. She qualified in Physiotherapy in UCD, completed an MSc in Physiotherapy in the University of East London, and MSc in Mindfulness Based Interventions in UCD and a PhD in UCD. She has held positions as Head of Subject and Associate Dean for Physiotherapy and Director of the MSc in Neuromusculoskeletal Physiotherapy in UCD and is a founder co-director of the Centre for Translational Pain Research.  She currently teaches on the BSc Physiotherapy and Masters of Physiotherapy programmes in UCD and teaches an elective Mindfulness module for undergraduate Health Professional and Veterinary Medicine students. She is a member of the EFIC Steering Committee that developed the Curriculum for the European Diploma in Pain Physiotherapy (EDPP) and is an examiner for the EDPP.  Her research interests are in the area of chronic musculoskeletal pain in relation to the identification of Musculoskeletal related pain states according to underlying neurophysiological pain mechanisms and the evaluation of multidisciplinary approaches for the treatment of chronic pain. Recent research has included the evaluation of third wave mindfulness based interventions combined with exercise for people living with chronic pain, via both in person and online pain management programmes.   

Daniel is associate professor at the Center for Neuroplasticity and Pain, Department of Health Science and Technology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Aalborg, Denmark. Daniel has a background as clinical neurologist specialized in pain. He has a special interest in pain in neurological diseases, as well as in neuromodulation. Daniel coordinated the Pain Center at the University of Sao Paulo for 12 years and started the first pain residency program for neurologists in that institution in 2013. Daniel serves as Section Editor for the European Journal of Pain and Advisory Board of Pain Reports and is member of The EFIC Academy.  

Daniel Segelcke graduated at the Ruhr University of Bochum, where he received extensive training in behavioral biology and animal pain models for migraine. Following his PhD in 2012, he joined the laboratories of Esther Pogatzki-Zahn (EPZ) at the University of Münster to investigate behavioral, cerebral processing and proteome signatures in animal models for post-surgical, pathogene pain, neuropathic pain, and bone-tumor induced pain. He successfully established novel rodent behavior assays, devices and analytic methods to investigate multidimensional pain modalities in rats and mice in longitudinal studies. Machine learning approaches performs some of these analysis methods. During his time at the University of Münster, he raised peer-reviewed funding for a preclinical systematic review, which investigate the impact of buprenorphine (opioid) in biomedical animal research. During his time at the University of Münster, he raised peer-reviewed funding for a preclinical systematic review, which investigate the impact of buprenorphine (opioid) in biomedical animal research.

Deirdre has lived with chronic pain since 2008, and has contributed to the voluntary sector for many years. In particular with chronic pain and mental health charities. Her role as president of Pain Alliance Europe began in June 2021. Pain Alliance Europe (PAE) is a pan-European patient organisation that represents the voice of people in pain in Europe regardless the underlying cause. 

Professor MD/PhD in General Practice and professor competency and Behavioural Medicine. Certified competency in Pain medicine, specialist in Psychiatry and General Practice. Affiliation: Department of Public Health and Nursing (ISM), Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. Senior consultant in Clinical Pain and fatigue rehabilitation medicine, Coperio Medical Center. President of the Norwegian Association for Pain Medicine. Main interests: Chronic widespread pain including fibromyalgia and other primary pain conditions; pain taxonomy; pain, stress and immunology; pain in primary care, societal burden of chronic pain; pain treatment and rehabilitation. 

Felicia is a Nurse Consultant in Pain Management. She is a past Chair of RCN Pain and Palliative Care Forum and is a co-opted member of the Council of the British Pain Society Council. She is a committee member of the EFIC Covid Task Force and EFIC Research Strategy group, the IASP Acute Pian Special Interest Group and a founder member of the Pain Nurse Network.  

Felicia is the co-editor of the British Journal of Pain. The breadth of her pain related publications spans the continuum from the Daily Telegraph to The Lancet with systematic reviews, chapters and books in between. She has also co-authored e-learning modules on pain and medicine safety and has contributed to several FPM publications. 

She is an Honorary Lecturer at Kings College London. She has been awarded Honorary Membership of the British Pain Society and Fellowship of the RCN for her services to pain. Her clinical and research interests include chronic post surgical pain and procedural pain and enjoys supporting novice authors to publish and disseminate their work.   

Professor Gisèle Pickering (MD, PhD, DPharm) is Professor of Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology at the University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand, France. She is the Director of the Inserm CIC 1405 Clinical Research Centre and is a permanent member of the Inserm 1407 Laboratory of Fundamental and Clinical Pharmacology of Pain. Her main topics of research concern the mechanism of action of analgesics, including NMDA antagonists for severe chronic pain, the impact of pain on cognitive-emotional processes and pain management in older persons. She regularly contributes to peer-reviewed publications on Pharmacology and on Pain, to international meetings and belongs to national and international Pain, Pharmacology and Geriatrics Societies. She participates to the validation of observational scales for older persons with communication (Doloplus, Algoplus) and sensory disorders (Visiodol) and to expert consensus on pain care. She is the Chair of the Research Committee at the European Pain Society (EFIC). She is the author of over 150 publications and the editor of several books.  

Dr. Jan Vollert is a bioinformatician with a PhD in Neurophysiology from the Medical Faculty Mannheim of the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the application of statistical and computational models in pain research, mainly in Quantitative Sensory Testing. He has conducted analyses of quantitative sensory testing data of patients suffering from neuropathic pain that have been largely acknowledged in the field.  

He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and its Neuropathic Pain Special Interest Group, where he works on public outreach and trainee representation. He was invited speaker at congresses of the IASP, the NeupSIG, and the European Pain Federation. He published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, and his h-index is 19. 

She holds M.Sc. degree from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and Ph.D. degree from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She received habilitation in 2013 at the Jagiellonian University Medical College and since 2021 holds an academic rank of Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences.  

After receiving PhD degree in Medical Sciences at the University of Utrecht, she started a post­doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry CNR in Pozzuoli (Naples, Italy) in the Endocannabinoid Research Group headed by prof. Vincenzo Di Marzo. Continuing her interest in the search for effective substances to treat pain, she conducted a study on the role of TRPV1 receptors located in the CNS and their possible involvement in pain and nociception. 

After completing a postdoctoral fellowship, in October 2007 she was employed as a Research As­sociate in the Department of Pain Pharmacology, Institute of Pharmacology Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków (Poland), headed by prof. Barbara Przewłocka. She continued the study on the role of the endovanilloid and endocannabinoid systems with particular emphasis towards neuropathic pain. Subsequently, her research interests expanded to include the issue of degen­erative joint disease (osteoarthritis, OA).  

An important research topic, high involvement of young scientists and significant financing of the research by external sources (LIDER NCBiR and SONATA BIS NCN) resulted in her appointment as Head of the Laboratory of Pain Pathophysiology at the Department of Pain Pharmacology (at the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków).  

With the appointment as the Head of the Department of Neurochemistry in 2017, she pro­posed a new research direction for the Department, namely combining pain experiences with activity mesolimbic reward system, as well as an indication of the learning mechanism as important element of persistent effects of severe pain. Prof. Starowicz’s group is also engaged in determining the cannabinoid function in chondrocyte regeneration, in determining the inflammatory component in OA as well as in studying the function of cannabinoid receptor ligands in the regulation of chondrocytes and osteoblast activity. In April 2021 President of Poland awarded her with a title of full professor in medicinal and health sciences. 

She specializes in the strategies of chronic pain treatment, especially in extending the effectiveness of neuropathic and osteoarthritis pain therapy through targeting the endogenous cannabinoid system. 

I graduated from King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of London in 2000, having also obtained an intercalated BSc in Biomedical Sciences & Anatomy (1997). I completed the majority of my postgraduate training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the Oxford Deanery, obtaining my CCT in 2015. During this time I undertook a DPhil in Prof Irene Tracey's Pain Imaging Neuroscience group investigating the influence of hormones on pain processing in humans and continued my post-doctoral work as an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer and then as the Senior Pain Fellow in the department. I was appointed as the Senior Fellow in Pain in Women in 2019.

Additional current roles include: Chair of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) SIG on Abdominal and Pelvic Pain; member of the RCOG Blair Bell Research Committee; and Medical Advisory Panel member for Endometriosis UK.

Dr. Van Boxem is anesthesiologists with a specialization in pain medicine. He works at the multidisciplinary pain center of the Hospital East-Limburg, Genk, Belgium.

Since 2007 he has a scientific affiliation with the University of Maastricht, Netherlands, where he obtained his PhD in 2014 about lumbosacral radicular pain (promotor: Prof. dr. van Kleef, prof. dr. Joosten, prof dr. Van Zundert). He obtained the Fellow in Interventional Pain (FIP)certificate from the World Institute of Pain (WIP) in 2002. In 2018 he obtained the European Diploma Pain Medicine (EDPM) from the European Pain Federation (EFIC).  

He is lecturer at the faculty of Pain Medicine at the University of Hasselt, Belgium. He teaches interventional pain medicine at the interuniversity course of algology and is instructor in different international cadaver workshops.  

He authored more the 25 articles in PubMed indexed journals and has a h-index of 11 (scopus). He also authored 7 book chapters and several letters to the editor and publications in non-PubMed indexed journals. He is reviewer for several journals on pain medicine. 

Dr Koen Van Boxem is an active member of different national and international anesthesiology and pain societies. He is frequently asked to give lectures at scientific meetings (Belgian Pain Society, World Institute of Pain, European Society of Anesthesiology, European Society of Regional Anaesthesia and pain therapy,) and to lecture for a lay public. He is vice-president of the World Institute of Pain section Benelux and since 2018 member of the educational committee of this world-wide organization. Since 2018 he is the president of the Vlaamse Anesthesiologische Vereniging voor Pijnbestrijding (VAVP) in Belgium. 

Kristian Petersen is an early career researcher (age: 36) and has been active within the research on mechanistic pain profiles in osteoarthritis over the last 10 years. Dr. Petersen has conducted studies on the association between pre-treatment mechanistic pain profiles and pain-relieving responses to total join replacement surgery, 3-weeks of NSAIDs, and 8-weeks of exercise therapy. In addition, Dr. Petersen has studied factors associated with the modulation of mechanistic pain profiles and demonstrated that these can be sensitized by e.g. sleep deprivation.  

Dr. Petersen has chaired several workshops at the Congresses of the European Pain Federation EFIC (2017, 2019) and the IASP World Congresses on Pain (2020/2021 and 2022). 

Prof. Malgorzata Krajnik, MD, PhD, specialist in internal disease and in palliative medicine,  Head of Palliative Care Department at Collegium Medicum in Bydgoszcz, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. President of Polish Association for Spiritual Care in Medicine. Her areas of interest have included cancer pain, breathlessness and cough, opioidergic systems in the human respiratory tract and in heart, itch in cancer, pneumodosimetric system for nebulisation of opioids, trajectory of dying, integrated end-of-life care for people with COPD and heart failure, fatigue in cancer, opiophobia, ethical issues at the end of life, communication with the patient and family, psychooncology, spirituality in medicine. 

Manuela Schmidt has worked on ion channels and their regulation in the context of pain since her postdoctoral stay in the laboratory of Ardem Patapoutian (HHMI, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, USA). In 2012 she established her research group at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine (Goettingen, Germany) with funding from the Emmy Noether-Programme (German Research Foundation, DFG). Since September 2020 she has been a full professor heading the Division of Pharmacology Toxicology at the University of Vienna. Manuela´s laboratory “Systems Biology of Pain” integrates preclinical mouse models and human surrogate models with state-of-the-art quantitative proteomics to tackle mechanisms underlying (chronic) pain states. In this way her laboratory strives to gain mechanistic insights into age- and sex-dependent pain pathology – an endeavor, which lies at the heart of both understanding the molecular signature of chronic pain and identifying novel pain players. 

Nadja Nestler is a registered nurse with an advanced training in anesthesia and intensive care. After diploma program of nursing, she worked as a pain nurse at the Department for Pain-Therapy at the University Hospital of the Employers' Liability Insurance Association in Bochum, Germany. Since 2009, she was a research associate in different research projects at the Institute of Nursing Science and Practice at the Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg; at first the project “Action Alliance Pain Free City Muenster” (2009 to 2014). Since 2017, she is an assistant professor with research focus on chronic care, she is Head of Department Nursing Development Center and Deputy Director of the Institute. She was a member of the expert group for the actualization of the German Expert Standard for Pain Management in Nursing, member of the working group for the development of the European core curriculum for pain nursing. She is a member of the President’s Campaign of the EFIC. As a member of the German Pain Association, she is speaker of the permanent advisory board of this association, and member of a commission to develop a German curriculum for pain nursing. 

Patricia Lavand’homme MD, PhD is working as an  anesthesiologist and pain specialist  at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, where she is director of the Acute Postoperative Pain service and the Transitional Pain Service. Prof. Lavand’homme  has published several papers including book chapters on acute postoperative pain mechanisms and management as well as on the prevention of persistent pain after surgery.  She has worked several years in Pain Clinic after a fellowship in United States.  She is member of various scientific societies, past-Chairperson of the Acute and Chronic Pain Scientific Committee of the European Society of Anesthesiology.  She has been involved in the IASP Task Force mandated by the WHO to develop a new pragmatic classification of chronic pain  (including chronic post-surgical and post-traumatic pain) to be included in the revised version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD11).  Pr Lavand’homme currently collaborates to several international studies supported by European grants. 

Przemysław Bąbel, Ph.D., is a full professor of psychology working at the Jagiellonian University, where he serves as the director of the Institute of Psychology, the chair of the Research Discipline Council for Psychology, and the head of the Pain Research Group. He is also the president of the Polish Society for Behavioral Psychology and a member of the Committee on Psychological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Prof. Bąbel‘s research interests include learning mechanisms of placebo effects in pain, the memory of pain, and psychological factors affecting pain perception. He is also interested in the applications of behavior analysis in pain treatment. Prof. Bąbel has co-authored nearly 100 scientific publications, including eight books, and more than 100 popular science publications. He has served as a principal investigator of several grants funded by the National Science Centre in Poland. In 2019 Prof. Bąbel was awarded the Association for Psychological Science Fellow status for his sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology. 

Dr. rer. nat. Dipl.-Psych. Ulrike Kaiser
Principal Investigator VAPAIN
University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden
Comprehensive Pain Center University Hospital Technical University Dresden, German