Dr Yogesh Kalkonde is a public health researcher and a neurologist. He is trained in India and the United States in medicine, neurology and clinical research. After working as a faculty in the Department of Neurology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, he moved to rural India twelve years ago to work with rural communities that have limited access to care. He has conducted studies on the epidemiology of stroke and was a PI of a large trial of a community-based intervention to reduce stroke deaths in rural central India. Currently he is working with Sangwari, a non-profit organization which works in the underdeveloped regions of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India. He is a recipient of the prestigious Wellcome Trust/DBT fellowship in public health and the Bruce Shoenberg International Award in Neuroepidemiology by the American Academy of Neurology. He serves as an expert member on several task forces on stroke and non-communicable diseases of the Indian Council of Medical Research. His long-term goal is to identify effective public health strategies to prevent and improve care of stroke in rural areas of India which can be scaled up in resource poor settings in low- and middle-income countries.

As a postdoc and resident at the department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers, the Netherlands, I am currently working on the IRIS collaboration project. In IRIS, we are pooling all trials on the value of intravenous rtPA prior to endovascular treatment: DIRECT-MT, SKIP, DEVT, DIRECT-SAFE, SWIFT DIRECT, and MR CLEAN-NO IV. As one of the NO IV's coordinating investigators, I am happy to be part of this follow-up project making the most of our trial data! Apart from alteplase, my work on endovascular treatment for stroke involves radiological thrombus characteristics, carotid lesions in stroke, radiological imaging-based treament selection, outcome prediction, CT perfusion, and medium vessel occlusions.

Mira Katan received her MD from the University of Zurich and was trained in Neurology at the University Hospital of Basel (both in Switzerland) before she moved to New York (US) for a research fellowship at Columbia University (New York, US). Currently she is leading the comprehensive Stroke Unit of the University Hospital of Basel. Mira Katan is broadly interested in the diagnosis, management, treatment, and outcome of stroke patients. Her research focuses on the identification and validation of different biomarkers to provide more precise information (i.e. precision medicine approach) for advanced early risk stratification but also improved identification of the underlying stroke etiology for an individually tailored secondary prevention. She has initiated and conducted several prospective large cohort studies (COSMOS, Co-RISK, BIOSIGNAL) and built up a multicenter blood biobank of acute ischemic stroke patients. Moreover, she is the PI of the MOSES trial, the first blood biomarker-guided multicenter, international RCT in secondary stroke prevention in Europe. Her research activities are reflected in the publication of more than 90 peer-reviewed articles as well as by several awards. She is member of the editorial board of several journals (such as NEUROLOGY and STROKE) and serves as secretary general of the Swiss-Stroke-Society.