Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
It’s time for the election of the WMS Executive Board again and this year the electoral process is slightly different. I think it’s improved and offers WMS members an opportunity to express their opinion and to choose representatives whose experience will guide the future of the Society. I have had the privilege to act as the president of the WMS since April 2020 and, despite the difficult time with the COVID pandemic, thoroughly enjoyed working with my Executive Board colleagues and the WMS secretariat. I was first elected to the Executive Board after we hosted the WMS congress in Newcastle, UK, in 2008. The congress in Halifax will be the 23rd WMS congress that I attend. For several years I was also actively involved in the WMS teaching course, which is an excellent professional development opportunity for anyone interested in neuromuscular diseases. It’s also great that the Society has its own scientific journal, Neuromuscular Disorders. I have served on the editorial board of the journals for about 18 years and am currently one of the Associate Editors.
Under my presidency and with fantastic support from the elected officers, Gisèle Bonne and Laurent Servais, the Executive Board, the Programme and Prize Committee, the WMS secretariat with Clare Beach and her team, and many passionate colleagues from the WMS membership, we have started to address topics that are becoming more and more relevant for a learned society with global outreach: effective and useful communication through social media and updated website tools, international public and patient engagement, sustainable and eco-friendly congresses and meetings, and equality, diversity and inclusion throughout all of the Society’s activities.
As patients with neuromuscular diseases start to benefit from the translation of promising basic research developments into safe and effective therapies, I endorse close partnerships of our Society with the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, while at the same time promote our academic independence.
I think that working in the neuromuscular field is more exciting than ever and that the WMS can play an important and proactive role in shaping the promising future for our field. This is the reason why I’m enthusiastically running for the WMS Executive Board again.
Volker was trained as a Paediatric Neurologist at the University of Düsseldorf and the University of Essen in Germany. After his PhD on Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Kevin Campbell at the University of Iowa. In 2003 Volker joined the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University as the Harold Macmillan Professor of Medicine. He is currently the director of the university’s John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre, a centre with about 100 staff dedicated to translational research in genetic neuromuscular diseases, and the deputy dean for the Newcastle University Translational and Clinical Research Institute, the largest of three institutes of the Faculty of Medical Sciences.
Working in the field of rare diseases, many of Volker’s leadership activities have been international and much of his funding has come from EU programmes. He was the grant holder, founder and co-coordinator of TREAT-NMD, a network of excellence for genetic neuromuscular diseases funded by the EU with €10 Million (FP6). The network has now become a global alliance for translational research and provides services for industry, clinicians and scientists to bring novel therapeutic approaches into the clinic. In 2019 he established TREAT-NMD Services Ltd., the business arm of the alliance, and is one of the directors of the enterprise. He is a steering committee member for several EU funded projects and coordinated the SCOPE-NMD project (FP7), aiming to further advance the development of exon-skipping compounds for DMD. He also coordinated the COST Action "Applications of MR imaging and spectroscopy techniques in neuromuscular disease" (MYO-MRI) and is currently a steering group member for the large (€140 Million) IMI2 project conect4children (c4c), establishing a pan-European paediatric clinical trial network. He coordinated the MYO-SEQ project, a large exome sequencing project for patients with limb girdle weakness across Europe and is also co-director of the MRC funded International Centre for Genomic Medicine in Neuromuscular Disease led my Mike Hanna.
Volker is involved in the development of outcome measures for clinical trial purposes and acts as the chief or principal investigator for a number of natural history and interventional trials. He has a long-standing interest in molecular genetics and the pathogenesis of muscular dystrophies and related clinical conditions. He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, H-index = 86, i10-index = 285, and >28,500 citations on Google Scholar.
