Founder and creator of the Goleman Emotional Intelligence (EI) suite of Coaching and Training programs, Michele’s vision is to democratize EI as a mean of igniting personal and global agency.
Michele brings more than 25 years of executive leadership experience, working for industry leaders in healthcare, investment management, management consulting, and manufacturing. A founding member of Rangjung Yeshe Institute based in Kathmandu, Nepal, Michele has practiced mindfulness-based training for more than 27 years.

Lecture summary: As a physician, you are the nexus from which a patient’s experience emerges. In this lecture, we will explore the keys to unlocking your own emotional intelligence to bring positive impact to patient outcomes, peer relationships, and your own wellbeing. You will be allowed to:
• Learn – Specific micro-techniques (training for the brain) that allow you to increase your own: self-awareness, focus, emotional balance, and empathy
• Apply – Experiment seeing through the lens of Emotional Intelligence
• Reflect – The Ripple Effect: how do we create positive momentum from our own example?

Kilian Eyerich holds the chair for dermatology and venereology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm and is Heisenberg professor for dermato-immunology at the Technical University Munich. His scientific interest is to understand the interaction of immune cells and epithelial cells in inflammatory skin diseases, with the aim to re-classify inflammatory skin diseases into meaningful molecular endotypes. He published more than 120 articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, or Nature Immunology and received numerous grants and awards.

Lecture summary: Hundreds of inflammatory skin diseases (ncISD) were described over the last two centuries. While more and more specific biologics become available, our classification reaches its limits. The best we can do nowadays is to group ncISD according to their immune response pattern, thus giving a rational for a specific symptomatic treatment. To achieve a substantial breakthrough, disease heterogeneity has to be acknowledged when researching ncISD. This talk summarises current translational research approaches to do so, gives an overview on biomarkers proposed to define clinically meaningful endotypes of ncISD, and finally gives an outlook how the future of diagnosing and treating ncISD might look like.

Olivier Chosidow is Professor of Dermatology and past chair of the Department of Dermatology at the University Paris-est Creteil, Henri Mondor Hospital, Creteil, France. He is involved in Emergency Dermatology, Skin Infectious Diseases, including necrotizing fasciitis, and Severe Cutaneous Adverse Reactions to Drugs (SCARs). As a clinician researcher, he authored 525 articles to date, including NEJM, Lancet/Lancet ID, BMJ, JAAD, JAMA Derm, BJD, JID, …, and delivered around 580 talks at the national, European and international level.

Lecture summary: Knowledge of regulatory skin functions is essential, since « acute skin failure » may occur as a consequence of any severe skin disease, leading to hypovolemia, malnutrition, impaired thermoregulation and infection, which are all potentially life-threatening conditions.

The lecture will give an update on epidermal necrolysis manifestations, either drug-induced (toxic epidermal necrolysis/Stevens-Johnson syndrome) or not, along with other severe cutaneous acute reactions (SCARs) to drugs. Severe skin infectious disease conditions will also be discussed, including necrotizing fasciitis, for which we have currently a multidisciplinary care bundle. Major mycoplasma-related erythema multiforme will be also mentioned.

Tamar Nijsten has established a dermato-epidemiology group at the department of dermatology Erasmus MC resulting in a full professorship in dermatology in 2012 and a chair position in 2014. He has been president of the Dutch Society of Dermatology for 4 years. Since 2019, he is chair of the Erasmus MC Cancer Institute. Currently, he is also appointed as an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham (UK). In addition to his academic endeavors, he has been working and was a former co-owner of private focus clinics in skin cancer. Tamar Nijsten has published over 320 peer-reviewed international papers in 2020.

Lecture summary: Skin cancer is the most common cancer of people of European descent and its incidence is increasing steeper than most other cancers. This puts a burden on the healthcare system, especially on dermatological care. Moreover, skin cancer related costs are increasing due to its expanding volume, but also because of the newly available drugs for advanced disease. The increasing (financial) burden puts skin cancer in the spotlight of policy makers and insurance companies. They start to push more and more for reforms in the care for these patients. This creates opportunities for us dermatologists, the specialist of the skin, to be in the lead of the care of patients with skin cancer. The organization of care will change and the added value of different physicians in the patient journey will be part of the discussion in the next 10 years. What should be done by GPs, dermatologists, multidisciplinary teams (i.e., specific reference centers on national level) and international teams (such as advocated in ERN)? Moreover, quality and cost effectiveness of care will be monitored. Theoretical concepts that have been going around for several years such as eHealth, artificial intelligence, clinical prediction models and stratified medicine will be part of daily clinical care before 2030. The changes will challenge us to be able to deliver high quality care going from diagnostics to staging to advanced surgery to administrating new systemic drugs (i.e., immunotherapy). The next 10 years will be pivotal in positioning the dermatologists as the responsible physician in the management of skin cancer patients.

Christine Janus is CEO of the International Alliance of Dermatology Patient Organizations (IADPO) and has held that role since 2015. She has a proven track record as a strong patient advocate and was instrumental in founding IADPO and conceiving of the organization’s ground-breaking Global Research on the Impact of Dermatological Diseases (GRIDD) project. It has long been Christine’s view that people living with dermatological conditions around the world deserve much better access to care and treatment, and that by working together with like-minded organizations, this goal is achievable.

Lecture summary: By harnessing the power of the patient voice, there is an opportunity to elevate dermatology so that patients, dermatologists, researchers and dermatology nurses can have access to the resources they need. In the aftermath of COVID-19, how do we re-establish critical relevance with policy-makers, medical schools and research granting bodies and others, in order to fully address the needs of the patients who count on all of us for their care?

Chris Callewaert holds a master in Applied Biosciences, a master in Bioscience Engineering Chemistry and a PhD in Biological Sciences from Ghent University, Belgium. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University, Belgium, and postdoctoral research associate in the Knight lab at University of California, San Diego, USA. He studies the skin microbiome and metabolome in health and disease. His research led to about 20 peer-reviewed publications.

Lecture summary: Urbanization represents a profound shift in human behavior, with significant cultural and health-associated consequences. In this presentation, we describe the impact of urbanization on the skin microbiome and metabolome. The urbanization gradient goes from the traditional hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, to an Amerindian jungle settlement in Peru, to a rural village in Peru, to a town in Peru, to the favela’s in Brazil, to a big city in Brazil, and finally to Europe and North-America. Urbanization is associated with reduced microbial outdoor exposure, increased contact with housing materials, antimicrobials, cleaning products, and increased exposure to chemical diversity. Urbanization leads to a vast decrease in bacterial diversity on hands, and an increase in chemical diversity on hands. The natural human and plant-based molecules are largely replaced by synthetic and cosmetic ingredients on hands. We also note an increased diversity and absolute abundance of fungi with urbanization. For both bacterial and fungal composition, we saw an increase in potentially pathogenic taxa.

Professor Wolfgang Weninger received his M.D. from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1991, where he also trained in clinical dermatology and venereology at the same institution. From 1999-2003 he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA where he studied the mechanisms of immune cell trafficking to the skin. His clinical and research interests relate to the understanding of the cutaneous immune system in health and disease. He has discovered and functionally characterised several leukocyte populations, including dermal group 2 innate lymphoid cells and dermal gamma-delta T cells. Professor Weninger is the recipient of numerous competitive grants and national and international awards. His work has been published in leading journals such as Cell, Nature and Science.

Lecture summary: Macrophages are an important innate immune cell subset involved in the regulation of tissue homeostasis and the response to inflammatory stimuli, pathogens and neoplastic transformation. It is generally assumed that monocytes represent the obligatory precursors for macrophages in the adult organism. In this talk, I will describe the discovery of a novel, non-monocytic macrophage precursor present in adult bone marrow. These cells give rise to a variety of tissue-resident macrophages under inflammatory conditions and in tumors. We have also been able to track the development of these precursors during ontogeny and reveal that they are unrelated to previously described embryonic precursors. These data challenge the current macrophage development paradigm and suggest the existence of an independent pathway of macrophage generation in the adult.