Prof. Anna Maria Aloisi was born in Montalcino (Siena), Italy, in 1960, took the degree in Medicine at Siena University in 1985 and spent all her academic career in the Institute of Human Physiology at the University of Siena. Her research activity is characterized by a continuous interaction with many national and international groups and was focused on the study of pain mechanisms with particular attention on the sex differences in the pain-induced responses and on the role of gonadal hormone-induced effects in pain mechanisms in humans and rodents. Her further interest is on the role of the limbic system in behavior.

Carlo V Bellieni is a neonatologist and a bioethicist based in Siena (Italy) and father of three. He is member of the National “Analgesia and Pain” Study Group of the Italian Society of Neonatology, and member of the Tuscany Region Committee of Bioethics. He has published more than 300 papers and several books on neonatal pain. He has created the “sensorial saturation”, a validated non pharmacologic analgesic method for newborns, and the “ABC scale” to measure pain in neonates using their crying. He has patented an electronic tool to assess neonatal pain using the babies’ cry, and a system of soundproofing of neonatal incubators. He is a referee of more than 30 scientific international journals and a member of the scientific committee of 15. He’s got the qualification of full professor in Pediatrics.

Dr. Michael Boettger was born in Würzburg/Germany in 1976. During his medical studies, he was at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena/Germany and at Imperial College London/UK and received his MD in 2003, and board certification and habilitation in physiology in 2010. After working in academia where he held positions in neurology and physiology and which were all focused on pain research, he joined Bayer AG, Division Pharma in 2010. There, he started heading two laboratories for preclinical research for 4 years,  and later moved to early clinical development up to proof of concept (phase 2a) in a number of different indications. Areas of interest in pain research with are inflammatory pain in the context of rheumatoid arthritis, pain in endometriosis, pain perception in psychiatric conditions, the thermal grill illusion and the role of pain in exercise and sports medicine. In these areas, he authored and co-authored > 50 publications. 

Prof. Giancarlo Carli was born near Siena, Italy in 1938. He received his MD Degree from Siena University (1962) and was postdoctoral fellow both at Siena (Prof. Alberto Zanchetti) and Pisa (Prof. Giuseppe Moruzzi) Universities and at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Prof Vernon B. Mountcastle). He developed his academic carrier in Siena first as associate (1971) and then as full Professor (1981). He served as Chairman of the Institute of Human Physiology (1974-2002) and as Chairman of the Department of Physiology (2008-2010). He is an expert on the effects of persistent pain on animal behavior and on chronic pain in fibromyalgia patients.

Antonella Ciaramella is a M.D., psychiatrist and psychotherapist. From 1998 to 2013, she worked in the Pain Therapy Unit of Santa Chiara Hospital in Pisa as a consultation psychiatrist. From 1998 to 2002, she worked as a lecturer in the degree course of Psychology University of Florence teaching neurobiological elements of the psychological activity. From 2006 until 2018, she worked as a lecturer in the degree course of Health Psychology of Pisa University teaching Psychosomatic Medicine. Her research activity is focused on psychological aspects and psychophysics of pain. She has been reviewer for European Journal of Pain, Pain Medicine, PLOSone, BMJ open. She is currently the chair of the SIG “chronic pain” of European Association of Psychosomatic Medicine (EAPM). She is a president of Aplysia onlus, which is accredited by MIUR for training in psychotherapy and partner in the education program of University of Pisa, Florence and Padua.

Marshall Devor was born in Toronto, Canada in 1949. His AB and PhD degrees were from Princeton University (1970) and MIT (1975). He was a postdoctoral fellow with the pain research pioneer Prof. P.D. Wall at University College London and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (HUJI). He joined the HUJI faculty as Research Associate in 1977 and rose to the rank of Professor in 1988. He served as Department Chairman (3 terms) and in a number of other University, national and international roles. He has contributed considerably to the understanding of the physiological basis of neuropathic pain and more recently to mechanisms involved in loss of consciousness and pain-free surgery.

Pierangelo Geppetti (PG), MD, is professor of clinical pharmacology at the medical School of the University of Florence, Director of the Department of Health Sciences of the University of Florence, and and Chief of the Clinical Unit - Headache Center and Clinical Pharmacology of the University Hospital of Careggi - Florence. He started his clinical and research activity at the at the Headache Centre of the Institute of Internal Medicine of the University of Florence under the guidance of Prof. Federigo Sicuteri, and spent three years (1991-1993) of research at the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and the Cardiovascular Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco. He has been Associate Professor (1998-2002) at the University of Ferrara, where he founded the local Headache Centre. His scientific activity has addressed the role of primary sensory neurons and the neuropeptides substance P and calcitonin gene related peptide in neurogenic inflammation, migraine headache and other types of pain. More recently, after an initial interest on the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel, he focused on the implication of the TRP ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) channel expressed by nociceptive neurons and Schwann cells in sustaining chronic pain.

Dr Philip R Holland undertook his initial Neuroscience BSc at the University of Glasgow, UK and subsequently focused on primary headache disorders during his PhD at University College London, UK. Following postdoctoral positions at the University of California San Francisco, USA and the University of Edinburgh, UK, he became a lecturer and subsequently senior lecturer at King’s College London, UK.
His research is focused on developing a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying migraine and other headache disorders, with a particular current interest in how altered circadian and homeostatic mechanisms can influence migraine attack susceptibility. He serves on many national and international headache committees and is an associate editor of Cephalalgia.

Marzia Malcangio is Head of the Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases and Professor of Neuropharmacology at King’s College London where she has established an internationally renowned laboratory devoted to the study of the positive and negative modulation of pain transmission with particular emphasis on chronic pain.
She has published more than 100 papers on pain and edited a book on Synaptic plasticity in Pain. Her current work explores novel approaches to target neuropathic and arthritic pain unveiling the involvement of microglia in the CNS and monocyte/macrophages in the periphery and the mechanisms governing immune-neuronal cell communication.

Karl Messlinger studied Biology, Psychology and Medicine at the University of Würzburg, where he received his MD degree in 1987 and joined the group of R.F. Schmidt at the Institute of Physiology working on articular nociception. He visited the Dental School of the University of Toronto (B.J. Sessle) and the Institute of Environmental Medicine of the Nagoya University (T. Kumazawa) as a Research Fellow and later as a Visiting Professor. In 1997 he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Institute of Physiology and Pathophysiology (H.O. Handwerker) of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, where his group is mainly working on meningeal nociception and the basic mechanisms of headache generation.

Dr. Lenaic Monconduit received her Masters in Neurosciences at the  University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). She completed her PhD at the University Paris VI, studying the reticulo-thalamo-cortical pain pathways from an anatomical and electrophysiological point of view. She conducted her post-doctoral research at Rutgers University (Pr G. Buzsaki, Newark, USA).  Here she studied the involvement of hippocampal network in memory processes. She is currently based at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, studying the mechanisms of migraine progression leading to chronic migraine. In particular, she focuses her research on the brainstem nuclei involved in trigeminal pain modulation.

Daniela Pietrobon received her Ph.D (Chemistry) from the University of Padova, and was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at Harvard Medical School. After being a Researcher (1983) and a Director of Research (1991) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), she was appointed Associate Professor (1993) and then Professor of Physiology (2000) in the Dept of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padova, where she leads a research team focused on the investigation of the cellular and circuit mechanisms of the primary brain dysfunctions that cause a rare monogenic form of migraine using genetic mouse models of the disease.

Dr. Janosch A. Priebe (born 1985) is a psychologist and neuroscientist. He received his PhD from the University of Bamberg (2016) where he researched on pain processing and facial pain communication in patients with Parkinson’s disease. At the moment he works as a senior research fellow at the Center of Interdisciplinary Pain Medicine at the MRI Munich, Germany, run by Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas R. Toelle.
Janosch A. Priebe is an expert for digital medicine, research methods and statistics. His present research deals with mHealth and eHealth interventions for patient with low back pain as well as acceptance of digital interventions in patients and medical professionals. He operatively manages the research activities in the Rise-uP project (G-BA, Germany) which aims to integrate digital treatment elements for low back pain into regular care. Furthermore, he works on methodological recommendations for mHealth research.

Peter Reeh was born and grew up in the countryside near Nuremberg, Germany, in 1948. His MD (1975) and PhD (1979/81) were from the University of Erlangen. He was a PostDoc in the Physiological Institutes of the Munich and Heidelberg Universities, where he achieved his ’Habilitation’ (second doctorate) in 1986. He was appointed Full Professor in 1987 at the Institute of Physiology & Pathophysiology in Erlangen, where he served as Vice Director and (for 3 years) as Chairman until 2017. Formally retired as a ‘Senior Fellow’, he is now carrying on with research and publishing. His interests have ever been focused on the functions of the primary afferent, nociceptive neuron, applying electrophysiological, neurochemical and molecular biological methods to study the mechanisms of sensory transduction, sensitization, neuropeptide release and of action potential generation and conduction. His lab won several national and international research prizes.

Chair of Neurology and Director of the Neurology Residency Program at the University of Pavia. Director of the Headache Science Centre and Neurorehabilitative Unit at the IRCCS C. Mondino Foundation. Chair of the IHS Committee for the Guidelines of Clinical Trials. Coordinator and partner in competitive grants funded by the EU, the Italian Ministry of Health and the Italian Ministry of University. Dr Tassorelli received her medical degree summa cum laude from the University of Pavia, where she also completed her training in Neurology. She then obtained her PhD Degree in Human Psychobiology at the University of Modena (Italy) and spent a 2-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Dept. of Neuroscience of the University of Rochester (NY). She has served as a director in the Board of the International Headache Society and was a founding member and vice-President of the European Headache Alliance. She is Chief Editor of the section Headache Medicine and Facial Pain of the journal Frontiers in Neurology, and associate editor of The Journal of Headache and Pain. Dr. Tassorelli has authored more than 260 peer-reviewed publications and coauthored several books and book chapters.