Keynote Lecturers
Keynote Lecturers
Guest Lecturer
AHRS George Rogers Oration
North American Hair Research Society Lecture
Korean Hair Research Society Lecture
EHRS John Ebling Oration
Japanese Hair Research Society Lecture
Professor George Cotsarelis
Dr. Cotsarelis is the Albert M. Kligman Professor of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as the Director of the Program on Epithelial Regeneration and Stem Cells within the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He heads the University of Pennsylvania Hair and Scalp Clinic, and serves as co-Principal Investigator of the Skin Disease Research Center.
Dr. Cotsarelis attended the University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate and medical school education. As a medical student at Penn, he worked with Dr. Robert Lavker in the dermatology department where he identified epithelial stem cells in the cornea and then in the hair follicle. After a medical internship at Geisinger Medical Center, he completed a combined research and clinical dermatology residency at the University of Pennsylvania and then a Howard Hughes sponsored postdoctoral research fellowship for physicians with Dr. Mark I. Greene in the Pathology department at Penn. He joined the Dermatology faculty in 1996 and since then he has had continuous NIH funding to study epithelial stem cells in the skin and hair follicle. His research focuses on the role of epithelial stem cells in alopecia, wound healing and skin regeneration.
Laureate Professor Peter Doherty
Professor Peter Doherty shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1996 with Swiss
colleague Rolf Zinkernagel, for their discovery of how the immune system recognises virusinfected
cells. He was Australian of the Year in 1997, and has since been commuting between St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Melbourne. His research is mainly in the area of defence against viruses. He regularly devotes time to delivering public lectures, writing articles for newspapers and magazines and participating in radio discussions.
Peter Doherty graduated from the University of Queensland in Veterinary Science and became a veterinary officer. Moving to Scotland, he received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He is the first person with a veterinary qualification to win a Nobel Prize.
Peter is also the author of several books, including “A Light History of Hot Air” and “The
Beginners Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize”.
Professor Seong-Jin Kim
Director, Lee Gil Ya Cancer & Diabetes Institute,
Gachon University of Medicine and Science, Korea
Dr. Kim is one of the world's leaders in elucidating the key components of TGF- signal transduction pathway and mechanisms of altered signaling in diseases. Dr. Kim was a tenured senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, USA and returned to Korea as the first director of the Lee Gil Ya Cancer & Diabetes Institute in 2007 while serving as a Professor of the Ireland Cancer Center at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Kim has received numerous honors and awards, including The Ho-Am Prize in Medicine.
Professor Ralf Paus
After his medical studies at the Unversities of Wuerzburg, Berlin and Vienna, MD thesis work at the University of South Florida, Tampa, USA, and an internship at the University Hospitals of Basle and Zurich, Switzerlaand, Ralf graduated from the Free University of Berlin (1987).
Following post-doctoral research at Yale University (1987-90), Ralf trained as a clinical dermatologist in Berlin, where he became consultant dermatologist at the Charité University Hospital. He was Visiting Scholar at the University of California, San Diego (1992), and Visiting Professor at the Dept. of Molecular Medicine at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry, Munich-Martinsried (2005).
From 1999-2004 Ralf served as Professor and Vice-Chair of the Dept. of Dermatology, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, University of Hamburg. After assuming his current position as Head of Experimental Dermatology at the University of Luebeck, Germany (2005), Ralf has joined the University of Manchester (co-appointment as Professor of Cutaneous in Manchester in April 2008).
Ralf is Editor of Experimental Dermatology (since 2007), Section Editor of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology (since 2008), as well as Co-founder and Director for Basic Research of the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation (HSF), San Diego, USA.
In 2000, he co-founded the Italian skin research biotechnology company, Cutech Srl., Padova, which he left in 2005.
Ralf is married to an Italian immunologist (Silvia Bulfone-Paus, MD, PhD) with whom he has three children (Anna, Lisa, Leo) and collaborates extensively on research into interleukin-15 and mast cell biology.
Professor Rod Sinclair
Rod Sinclair is a Founding Member of the AHWRS. He is Professor of Dermatology at The University of Melbourne and wrote his first textbook on Diseases of the Hair and Scalp in 1999. His research has involved identification of genes involved in androgenetic alopecia, hair stem cell homing to injured muscle, identification of hair stem cell immune privilege as well as the pathomechanism of female pattern hair loss.
Dr Yutaka Shimomura
Yutaka Shimomura, obtained his M.D. in 1999 and his Ph.D. in 2003 from Niigata University School of Medicine in Japan. He did his first Post-doc in Niigata and then joined Angela Christiano's laboratory at Columbia University in 2006. Areas of research interest include hair keratin and associated proteins as well as molecular genetics in hereditary hair diseases. Recent discoveries include the P2RY5 and LIPH genes whose mutations underlie autosomal recessive woolly hair/hypotrichosis