Strategic Planning Board (SPB)

Director, Paediatric and neonatal Infectious Disease Unit / Paediatric Clinical Research Unit of the Department of Paediatrics, University of Padova. He is an MD and paediatrician specialised at the University of Padova, Italy.  His training took place at the Institute of Child Health in London and also at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. He has been Director of the Paediatric and neonatal Infectious Disease Unit and Paediatric Clinical Research Unit of the Department of Paediatrics, University of Padova, since 1985. He was Honorary Senior Lecturer for the Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Institute of Child Health in London (2002-2010) and has been Head of the Paediatric European Network Treatment of AIDS (PENTA) since 1993 and President of the PENTA Foundation since 2004. The professional achievement Carlo is most proud of is setting up the PENTA network and the PENTA Foundation. This is a large infrastructure and network including more than 80 sites around the world carrying out research and studies in Paediatric Infectious Disease and HIV. PENTA has been coordinating 5 EU funded projects and a partner in additional 8 projects. With his work Carlo hopes to provide better medicine for children and to do this there is a need to increase the knowledge on paediatric treatment and management of diseases in childhood. Working with his colleagues, Carlo believes that an important and realistic goal is to focus on providing better care to children and mothers. This includes implementation of prevention strategies through vaccination and carrying out effective and well designed research in children. His hopes for the impact of GRiP are to build an infrastructure which allows for the integrated use of existing research capacity, thus reducing the fragmentation and duplication of activities on developing medicine for children. Specifically the aim is to develop a training platform in Pediatric Clinical Pharmacology.

Director of the Italian National Centre for Rare Diseases at the Italian National Institute of Health (Rome, Italy). She holds a M.D. and a specialization in Histopathology from the University of Bologna, a master in Bioethics from the Rome University) a has carried out post-doctoral studies in Human Genetics at Yale University (CT-USA). She is Past-President (2010-2012) of ICORD (International Conference for Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs) Society; has been the Italian COMP (Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products) Member at EMA (2000-2009); a member of the former European Rare Diseases Task Force, EUCERD (European Union Committee of Experts on Rare Diseases) and a Member of the “Health Research” Advisory Group. Dr Taruscio is a Member of the Interdisciplinary Committee of IRDiRC, a member of the Advisory European Molecular Genetics Quality Network management board, a Member of the Management Board of the European Molecular Genetics Quality Network (EMQN), and she has been member of the advisory board of Eurogentest (NoE). She has been newly appointed to the European Commission Experts Group on Rare Diseases.

Paediatrician specialised in infectious diseases, Dr Mellado Peña is head of the General Paediatric-Infectious-Tropical Diseases Unit at the Hospital Universitario Infantil La Paz, and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Member of the PENTA Steering Committee and coordinator of the National Paediatric Medicine Committee, she has been President of the Spanish Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases – SEIP (2008-2012).
She is an external advisor of the Vaccine Advisory Committee of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (CAV-AEP) and collaborator with EMA-PDCO at validation on antiretroviral in children.

Paediatrician and pulmonologist, is currently working as a Deputy Head of Paediatric Intensive Care Unit in the Children’s Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw. After   graduating as a MD from Warsaw Medical   Academy in 1979, he did his postgraduate clinical training in Warsaw (Children’s Memorial Health Institute and Warsaw Medical Academy)   and in Paris (Hopital Antoine Beclere, Paris). He received his PhD from Children’s Memorial Health Institute in 1990. Since 2004 he is a member of the European Society of Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC). He published more than 150 papers in a national/international journals. During 4 years (1990-1994) he has been working as a medical consultant and later as a Medical Director of Boehringer Ingelheim in Poland. He was a principal investigator or co-investigator of almost 50 national/international clinical trials phase I – IV. Currently he is a Polish co-ordinator of the GRIP (Global Research in Paediatrics) programme founded by the EC. Since 1995 he is an expert of the Central Register of Clinical Trials in Warsaw, and since 2007 also a member of the Paediatric Committee, EMA in London. Since 2011 he is a member of the advisory group of experts to the Polish Ministry of Health. preparing a national program on rare diseases.

Miriam Sturkenboom is professor in Analysis of Observational Data at the department of Medical Informatics of the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. She is a pharmacist and received a PhD (with honors) in pharmacoepidemiology. She has been working with the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Database in the USA, the National Research Council in Italy and the Erasmus University in the Netherlands and is teaching Pharmacoepidemiology courses in several countries. Her research group focuses on knowledge discovery from data collected during routine health care. Under the guidance of Miriam Sturkenboom, the Integrated Primary Care Information database has become a well-known and valuable data source for epidemiological research. Her current research interest is to study drug and vaccine safety in large populations through the creation of national and most importantly international networks of databases and the use of novel tools from biomedical sciences for effectively analyzing such linked databases. Examples of successful international projects involving linkage of databases in various countries are the studies on drug safety in children as part of the TEDDY network of excellence (funded under EU FP-6), mining for adverse drug reactions in electronic databases (EU-ADR funded under EU FP-7) and investigating the safety of NSAIDs and arrythmogenic potential of drugs (SOS and ARITMO: both projects funded under EC-FP7). The last three studies are coordinated from the group in Erasmus MC, Miriam Sturkenboom is principal investigator of the SOS and ARITMO projects and co-leader of the EU-ADR project. She is member of the database resources working group of the European Network of Centres and of the steering committee for ENCePP that is coordinated by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). She is immediate past president of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and holds advisory roles in several organizations/institutions. Miriam Sturkenboom has published over 170 journal articles in peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of (pharmaco)epidemiology.

Sociologist; she has a Master’s degree in Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and is currently doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Bucharest. She has extended experience in monitoring and evaluation projects for health and community development. She contributed to conducting studies that evaluated the impact of social policies and in the fields of audio-visual communication, equal opportunities, women’s access to employment etc. She is internationally certified in Monitoring and Evaluation of National HIV/AIDS Programs. Fidelie has an International Graduation Certificate as Trainer of Trainers, accredited bt CNCFPA – Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport and the Ministry of Labor, Family and Social Protection. She joined RAA team in 2002 and since 2007 she has been coordinating the Monitoring and Evaluation department of the organisation.

Chair in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics at the School of Life and Medical Sciences, University College London and Senior Director Clinical Pharmacology Modelling & Simulation at GlaxoSmithKline, United Kingdom. In addition to his extensive experience in early and late clinical development, he leads a research group focused on biomarkers, disease modelling and clinical trial design methodology, which has resulted in numerous publications in clinical and scientific journals. Prof. Della Pasqua is a member of the Great Ormond Street Hospital UCL British Research Council (BRC) Strategy Board and coordinator of the Clinical Pharmacology module in the MSc training in Clinical Drug Development. Since 2008 he holds an affiliate lecturer position at the University of Cambridge where he contributes the MRes programme in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (TMAT). He also chairs the Medicines for Children Advisory Network (MCAN), an internal expert panel at GlaxoSmithKline is a member of the Global Research in Paediatrics (GRiP) Network of Excellence, where he coordinates the efforts on novel methodologies for the evaluation of risk-benefit balance of medicines in children. He is recognised for the successful introduction of quantitative pharmacology methods into the scope and strategy of different IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative) consortia aimed at the evaluation of efficacy and safety of novel medicines, Similarly, innovative research on the optimisation of dosing regimens for drug combinations has been shown by research on the paediatric use of antimalarial and antiviral drugs.