Li Hu, PhD, is a Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He received his PhD from the University of Hong Kong in 2010 and has been a principal investigator at the Institute of Psychology (CAS) since 2016. His research focuses on unraveling the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying pain perception and its modulation. Employing advanced cross-species paradigms, multimodal neuroimaging techniques, and cognitive neuromodulation approaches, his work mainly aims to identify reliable neural indicators associated with pain sensitivity and discriminability. Additionally, he actively investigates novel non-pharmacological analgesic strategies, such as neuromodulation and cognitive-behavioral interventions, and explores the underlying neural mechanisms that drive their efficacy. His research was been supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Beijing Natural Science Foundation, and industry collaborations.

David A. Seminowicz, PhD, is Professor and Wolfe-Western Fellow, Department of Medical Biophysics, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Western Ontario. He earned a BSc from the University of Guelph, a PhD at the University of Toronto and completed postdoctoral training at McGill University. He was faculty at University of Maryland, Baltimore, from 2010-2022. He was also Principal Research Scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, in Sydney, from 2019-2022. His work has focused on the cognitive aspects of pain, individual differences in the response to pain, and the consequence of chronic pain on brain structure and function. His studies have clarified how pain-related and cognitive-related brain activity interact and how passive and active pain coping strategies affect these types of activity. His work further suggested a brain mechanism through which chronic pain might affect cognitive ability and continues testing this hypothesis in intervention studies in people with chronic pain. The clinical populations in these studies include chronic low back pain, chronic and episodic migraine, and burning mouth syndrome. Dr. Seminowicz has also used rodent MRI to ask a question that could not easily be addressed in humans, such as how the brain changes over time from before the onset of an injury that leads to chronic pain to the time when the disease affects cognitive and affective behaviors. Ongoing studies in Dr. Seminowicz’s lab employ longitudinal designs to assess how interventions affect brain function and whether pain biomarkers can be developed. Another line of work examines the role of the claustrum in cognitive control and pain. The main techniques in his lab include quantitative sensory testing, EEG, structural and functional MRI, and simultaneous EEG-fMRI. His main funding has been from the NIH, CIHR, NSERC, intercampus initiatives, private foundations, and industry.

Walter Greenleaf is a behavioral neuroscientist and a medical technology developer working at Stanford University. With over three decades of research and development experience in the field of digital medicine and medical virtual reality technology, Walter is considered the leading authority in the field.

Dr. Greenleaf has designed and developed numerous clinical systems over the last thirty-five years, including products in the fields of: surgical simulation, 3D medical visualization, telerehabilitation, clinical informatics, clinical decision support, point-of-care clinical data collection, ergonomic evaluation technology, automatic sleep-staging systems, psychophysiological assessment, and simulation-assisted rehabilitation technologies, as well as products for behavioral medicine.

Associate Professor Tasha Stanton leads the Persistent Pain Research Group at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) and is co-Director of IIMPACT in Health at The University of South Australia, Adelaide. She is a clinical pain neuroscientist, with original training as a physiotherapist. Her research group works closely with consumers and with clinicians to identify real-world problems and devise new solutions. She has a specific interest in chronic pain, osteoarthritis, pain science education, and novel technologies, such as virtual and mediated reality, to enhance exercise engagement.

Dr. Vollert is a chronic pain researcher from Germany, where he did his PhD in neurophysiology at the University of Heidelberg. After six years at Imperial College in London,UK, he has joined the University of Exeter, UK, as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in October 2023.

His background is in data science and statistics, and he collaborates with clinicians across the UK and Europe to analyze multifaceted datasets searching for predictors of developing chronic pain (for example after surgery) and predicting response to treatment to enable personalized pain medicine. He uses a wide array of methods -sensory phenotyping, patient-reported outcomes, -omics – and machine learning to identify mechanistic subgroups.

Arya Rao, a MD-PhD candidate in the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program at Harvard Medical School and the chair of the MESH AI group at Massachusetts General Hospital. Arya graduated from Columbia University, where she studied Biochemistry and Computer Science. She broadly aims to apply novel machine learning methods to problems in healthcare, ranging from therapeutics to medical education to administrative efforts.

Yanhong Liu, MD, PhD, is an Associate Chief Physician of Anesthesiology and Associate Professor at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital, where she holds the rank of Senior Colonel in the People's Liberation Army. Dr. Liu completed her PhD in 2006 and received postdoctoral training in clinical research at Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital from 2010 to 2012. She has 20 years experience in clinical anesthesia and spearheads China's Acute Postoperative Pain Study as one of the leading principal investigators.

Alexander Stahmann, MSc. is the CEO of the German Multiple Sclerosis Registry. He completed his training as a medical computer scientist at the University of Göttingen in 2013 and worked as research associate at the Department of Medical Informatics at the University Medical Center Göttingen till 2016. Since 2016 he is a member of the board of the registry and since 2018 CEO of the non-profit society for research and project development in multiple sclerosis. The NGO is the data holder of the German MS-Registry, established in 2001. The Registry is involved in national and international research collaborations and serves as a data source for EMA mandated PASS.

David Holloway joined the electronic Persistent Pain Outcomes Collaboration (ePPOC) as Director in May 2022, after an extensive career in both the public and private sector, most recently as Director of Quality and Safety for an Australian community nursing and aged care organisation. ePPOC has been collecting pain outcomes data for more than a decade across Australia and New Zealand and is currently progressing towards the third iteration of its dataset. 

David has held a varied range of operational management and clinical governance roles covering both face-to-face and telehealth delivery models and completed his PhD thesis on the efficacy of virtual environments in increasing competence and confidence of nursing students in relation to medication administration.

Dr. Tania Di Renna, BSc., FRCPC., Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, completed her medical school and Anesthesiology residency training in Ottawa.  She obtained a chronic pain fellowship at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and has spinal cord stimulation training from Montreal Neurological Institute. 

She is currently the Medical Director of the Toronto Academic Pain Medicine Institute (TAPMI). TAPMI is a partnership of 5 academic hospitals that manage chronic pain in Toronto. She practices anesthesiology and chronic pelvic pain at Women’s College Hospital. She has a long leadership career in Chronic Pain. She served as the co-chair of the HQO Guidelines for Chronic Pain, the co-chair of the Ontario Chronic Pain Network and Ontario Representative for Pain Canada.  She is now the President-Elect of the Canadian Pain Society.

Nucelio Lemos underwent his medical graduation, as well as his Gynecology, Urogynecology and MIS training and PhD in Gynecology at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of Santa Casa de São Paulo, Brazil. He then attended a third Fellowship, in Pelvic Neurodysfunctions, by the International School of Neuropelveology in Zurich, Switzerland.

In 2011, he founded the Pelvic Neurodysfunction Clinics of the Department of Gynecology of the Federal University of São Paulo, which he still currently chairs and where he develops extensive research and teaching of all fields of Neuropelveology; namely:

 - treatment of Intrapelvic Nerve Entrapments and Neuropathic Pain of Intrapelvic Etiology;

 - Knowledge Transfer in Nerve-Sparing Radical Pelvic Procedures (including endometriosis and pelvic malignancies);

 - and rehabilitation of paraplegic patients through the Laparoscopic Implantation of Neuroprosthesis. The implementation of this specialty center and research lines was the main goal of his clinical post-doctoral work, which he completed      on January 2023.

He is past Chairman (2013-2016) of the Scientific Committee of the International Continence Society and Founding Member and past Chairman of the Scientific and Education Committee of the Latin American Pelvic Floor Association (ALAPP; 2014-2019) and past Director at Large of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists (2020-2021).

As of January 2017 he has been recruited by the Temerty Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto, at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Mount Sinai and Women’s College Hospitals where he continues to develop the research started in Brazil.

He has established a referral program for complex benign pelvic surgery, including complex laparoscopic reconstructive procedures, fistula care and complex pelvic pain, including advanced endometriosis, pudendal neuralgia and other intrapelvic neuralgias, and surgical treatment of mesh complications.

In the Summer of 2023, Dr. Lemos was promoted to full Professor of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the University of Toronto, in recognition to the international impact of his work.

Professor Mohamed Mabrouk is a Consultant Gynaecologist and Minimal Access Reproductive Surgeon, with special interests in endometriosis, advanced endoscopic surgery.

He is one of the founders of the Cambridge Endometriosis Centre, Cambridge University Hospitals, U.K..

Professor Mabrouk is an Adjunct Professor of Gynaecology in the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Demark. He is also a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Alexandria University, Egypt, and is the President of the Middle East Society of Gynaecologic Endoscopy (MESGE).

Professor Mabrouk received his training and earned the European Board in Obstetrics and Gynaecology from Bologna University, Italy. His MD thesis was in collaboration between Bologna and Alexandria Universities and he obtained his PhD in Endometriosis management from VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

He was appointed as a consultant Gynaecology Surgeon in the Sacred Heart Hospital in Negrar, Verona, Italy and worked as a senior consultant in the Endometriosis Centre of Bologna University Hospital, Italy.

Professor Mabrouk is a recognised international expert in the field of endometriosis, surgical anatomy and minimally invasive surgery. He is also author and co-author of numerous International, peer-reviewed publications and three books.

Dr. Lumley's primary scholarly interests are on emotions, stress, and physical health. Much of the research that he, his students, and colleagues conduct involves developing and testing emotion-focused interventions to reduce stress and improve health. For example, in numerous studies, they have examined the effects of written or verbal emotional disclosure. More recently, they have developed and tested "Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy" (EAET) for people who have primary pain conditions, such as fibromyalgia, headaches, chronic musculoskeletal pain, irritable bowel syndrome and pelvic pain.

Dr. Meulders is Associate Professor of Experimental Health Psychology at the UM Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience and visiting professor at KU Leuven. She is an experimental psychologist and pain scientist with extensive expertise in learning theory and laboratory conditioning models. Her research has focused on the psychological mechanisms in the transition from acute to chronic pain, and particularly, on learning processes in pain-related fear and avoidance behavior, and more recently, on how social factors may influence these learning processes. Her research group develops and employs sophisticated experimental, ecologically valid, and clinically relevant paradigms (robotic-arm operant avoidance paradigm) and novel techniques (VR) both in healthy volunteers and clinical populations, to increase fundamental knowledge about these learning processes to ultimately promote treatment innovation and tackle pain-related disability.

Associate Professor Fereshteh Pourkazemi is a researcher, artists, a clinical physiotherapist with over 18 years of experience and a leading academic within the Discipline of Physiotherapy at The University of Sydney. She is internationally recognised for reshaping models of chronic ankle instability management, integrating her expertise in chronic pain assessment and management into this field. A/Prof Pourkazemi currently leads multidisciplinary projects exploring innovative social interventions (including arts) for managing chronic pain and other chronic health conditions. As an educator, she holds the Senior Fellowship of Advanced Higher Education, and recently (2021-23) led the development of the Doctor of Physiotherapy (DPT) program at The University of Sydney. 

Mr. Taverner has lived experience with numerous chronic conditions, including Fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, Arthritis, Prinzmetal Angina, Anxiety, Depression and Glaucoma. And cooking is his go to therapy!  

Ian now provides cooking demos, talks, classes and programmes to numerous Charities, Hopsitals, Organisations and Expo Events all over the world, championing accessible, repeatable and enjoyable cooking

Dr. Hirsh is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Indianapolis and Director of the Pain Research Laboratory. He received his PhD in Clinical & Health Psychology from the University of Florida and completed postdoctoral training in rehabilitation research at the University of Washington School of Medicine. His laboratory examines how individual-level factors (e.g., biology, cognition, emotions) interact with interpersonal and socio-contextual factors (e.g., cultural heritage, social class, relationship status) to influence the experience of and judgments about pain. These research findings are then used to develop, test, and implement interventions to enhance equity and outcomes in pain care.

Associate Professor Tasha Stanton leads the Persistent Pain Research Group at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) and is co-Director of IIMPACT in Health at The University of South Australia, Adelaide. She is a clinical pain neuroscientist, with original training as a physiotherapist. Her research group works closely with consumers and with clinicians to identify real-world problems and devise new solutions. She has a specific interest in chronic pain, osteoarthritis, pain science education, and novel technologies, such as virtual and mediated reality, to enhance exercise engagement.