Medical University of Graz, Graz , Austria

Boston Children's Hospital, Boston , United States

University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven , Belgium

Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide , Australia

Dr Roula Ghaoui (MD, PhD) is an Adult Consultant Neurologist and an Early Career Research Fellow at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) in South Australia. She has set up a neuromuscular and neurogenetics service receiving referrals from around South Australia. She is a Chief investigator on several clinical trials investigating treatments for the mitochondrial and inflammatory myopathies. Dr Ghaoui has been on several medical advisory board panels for the treatment of rare disease including adults with spinal muscular atrophy and Pompe disease. She is on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Brain Foundation and a member of the Clinical Trials and Research Committee of the Mitochondrial Medical Network in Australia. She had been the state co-lead for the neuromuscular flagship arm of the Australian Genomics Health Alliance project (AGHA). Her clinical and research interests are in the diagnosis and management of the limb-girdle muscular dystrophies.

Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, Perth , Australia

I am a Molecular geneticist with special interest in adult and late-onset myopathies.

UAB, Birmingham , United States

Dr. Muthukumar Karuppasamy (Muthu) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Alexander Neuromuscular Disease Research Lab (Dr. Matthew Alexander) in the Department of Pediatrics, UAB. Muthu focuses on the generation and characterization of novel animal models and drug repurposing based drug discovery for neuromuscular disorders. He completed his Bachelors in Pharmacy at RVS College of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Coimbatore, India), Masters in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry from the Birla Institute of Technology (Ranchi, India), and Doctorate in Drug Discovery and Pharmacology at the Department of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore (NUS). Muthu worked in the academic research institutions and pharma/biotech industries in India and abroad for more than 5 years. When he is not in the lab, he spends time with his daughters and participates in community outreach and volunteering activities. Muthu hopes to support the WMS scientific community through sustainability committee membership and hone organizational and networking skills in his new role in WMS.

Folkhalsan Research Center, Helsinki , Finland

I work as a senior scientist in the Myofin research group, Folkhälsan Research Center, Helsinki, Finland. A biologist by training, I majored in genetics at the University of Helsinki and did my PhD on molecular pathomechanisms of muscular dystrophies in the Bjarne Udd group. After a postdoc period in the autophagy world, I returned to the Udd lab where I continue to study the molecular and cell biological mechanisms of muscle diseases, mostly using cell models. While my main interest is titin, I'm most of the time busy with other things such as chaperones and stress granules.

University of Pisa, Pisa , Italy

FULL PROFESSOR OF NEUROLOGY and DIRECTOR of the RESIDENCY PROGRAM in NEUROLOGY at the UNIVERSITY of PISA Medical School, CHAIR OF NEUROLOGY at the AZIENDA OSPEDALIERO UNIVERSITARIA PISANA, Pisa (Italy)

Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne , United Kingdom

Volker was trained as a paediatric neurologist at the universities of Düsseldorf and Essen. He wrote his PhD thesis on Duchenne muscular dystrophy and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Iowa/USA. He has a long-standing interest in mechanisms of genetic muscle diseases, with research using cell and animal models. His current research also involves the application of muscle imaging and next generation sequencing. He is a principal investigator for a number of natural history and interventional trials, the director of the John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre and deputy dean of Newcastle University’s Translational and Clinical Research Institute. He is an author on >450 peer-reviewed publications.