Dr. Pier Luigi Meroni has been trained in Internal Medicine-University of Milan, was nominated Full Professor in Internal Medicine in 2001 and in Rheumatology in 2005 (head of the Department of Rheumatology till 2017); he is now Director of the Immunorheumatology Research Laboratory – IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano-Milan. His scientific interest has been focused on autoimmune diseases, in particular, the pathogenesis of SLE and APS. He has published more than peer-reviewed 650 papers. H-index: 84 (Scopus), n. 8 TIS,Top_Italian_Scientists_Biomedical_Sciences. He was co-chairman of the IVth & 12th International Congress on Antiphospholipid Antibodies, and of the Vth International Congress on Autoimmunity. Dr. Meroni received the Roussel Prize in 1997 for the studies on the age-associated immune deficit, the EULAR Prize in 2005 for the research on APS, and the AESKU Prize for life contribution to autoimmunity (2014). He was the first Italian Master of the American College of Rheumatology in 2014. He has been Chairman and then a member of the IUIS/WHO/AF/CDC Committee for the standardization of diagnostic tests for rheumatic diseases, Italian Representative of the European Autoimmunity Standardization Initiative, founder of the IFCC Working Group Harmonization Autoimmune Serology Testing, and president of the Forum Interdisciplinare Ricerca Malattie Autoimmuni.

Professor Pierre Miossec MD PhD is a distinguished professor of Clinical Immunology at the University of Lyon, France. He trained with Morris Ziff as a research fellow at the University of Texas in Dallas, where he started his research on the role of cytokines and T cells in arthritis. He was the first to identify the destructive properties of interleukin-17 and to introduce the concept of its production by a new T cell subset. This has led to the targeting of IL-17 in a growing number of diseases. He was awarded the EULAR Robecchi Prize for Rheumatology Research in 1995 and the most prestigious Carol Nachman prize in 2010 for this contribution. He gave the Morris Ziff lecture in Dallas in 2010. He received the distinguished basic investigator award from the American College of Rheumatology in 2015, and the Gerald Weissmann prize from New York University in 2016. He was elected senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2011, membre correspondant de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine in 2016, member of the prestigious Association of American Physicians in 2019, Master of the American College of Rheumatology in 2020 and membre titulaire de l’Académie Nationale de Médecine in 2021.