SPEAKERS
Please note that this page will be updated regularly.
Keynote speakers
Prof. George Bonanno
Columbia University, Teachers College
Professor of Clinical Psychology, Director of the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab, and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. My research interests center on the question of how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity, with an emphasis on resilience and the salutary role of flexible emotion regulatory processes.
Prof. Sir. Simon Wessely
King’s College London
Maudsley Hospitals
Professor Sir Simon Wessely is Professor of Psychological Medicine and Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s College and the Maudsley Hospitals.
He is a Foundation Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health Research, and past President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal Society of Medicine. He has over 800 original publications, with an emphasis on the boundaries of medicine and psychiatry, unexplained symptoms and syndromes, population reactions to adversity, military health, epidemiology and others. Simon Wessely founded the King’s Centre for Military Health Research. He also has a long standing interest in how both ordinary people and organisations react to adversity. Since 2013 he has been the Director of the Public Health England/NIHR Health Protection Research Unit into Emergency Preparedness and Response.
Invited speakers
Prof. Anke Ehlers
University of Oxford
Professor Anke Ehlers is Professor of Experimental Psychopathology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and co-director of the Oxford Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma. She is known for her work on psychological factors in anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorders and their treatment. With her colleagues she developed Cognitive Therapy for PTSD, one of the evidenced-based first line interventions for PTSD recommended by International Socitey for Traumatic Stress Studies (2019), National Institute for Care and Clinical Excellence (2018), and the American Psychological Association (2017).
Assoc. Prof. Suja Somanadhan
UCD School of Nursing,
Midwifery & Health Systems, University College Dublin
Dr Suja Somanadhan PhD, Assistant professor and researcher at the UCD School of Nursing, Midwifery & Health Systems, University College Dublin, Ireland. Dr Somanadhan also is an honorary research associate fellow with the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland. She was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar health impact award in 2019.
Prof. Ilene Serlin
Union Street Health Associates
China Institute of Psychology
California Institute of Integral Studies
Ilene A. Serlin, Ph.D, BC-DMT, is a licensed psychologist and registered dance/movement therapist in practice in San Francisco and Marin county. She is the past president of the San Francisco Psychological Association, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, past president of the Division of Humanistic Psychology. In 2019, she received the Rollo May award from APA’s Society for Humanistic Studies, and the California Psychological Association Distinguished Humanitarian Contribution award.
She is the editor of Whole Person Healthcare (2007, 3 vol.), and co-editor of Integrative Care for the Traumatized (2019).
Experts
Prof. Paul Boelen
Utrecht University and ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre
Prof. dr. Paul A. Boelen is full professor at the Department of Clinical Psychology at Utrecht University. He also works as a psychotherapist at ARQ Centrum'45. Paul Boelen is licensed supervisor and cognitive behavioral therapist with the Dutch Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy and is also affiliated with ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre.
Prof. Eric Bui
University of Caen Normandy
Eric Bui, MD, PhD is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Caen Normandy (France), and adjunct investigator at the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA) where he served in different leadership capacities as Harvard Medical School faculty, for nearly ten years. His research focuses specifically on understanding the mechanisms and improving the treatment of anxiety and stress-related conditions, including PTSD and Complicated Grief. To date, he has published over 150 scientific articles and book chapters, and edited two textbooks. He currently serves as the president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, and as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Mental Health.
Prof. Neil Greenberg
King’s College London
Professor Neil Greenberg is a consultant academic, occupational and forensic psychiatrist based at King’s College London. Neil served in the United Kingdom Armed Forces for more than 23 years and has deployed, as a psychiatrist and researcher, to a number of hostile environments including Afghanistan and Iraq. At King’s Neil leads on a number of military mental health projects and is a principal investigator within a nationally funded Health Protection Research unit. He also chairs the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) Special Interest Group in Occupational Psychiatry. Neil has published more than 300 scientific papers and book chapters and has been the Secretary of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the President of the UK Psychological Trauma Society and Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. During the COVID19 pandemic, Neil has worked closely with NHSEI, PHE and has published widely on psychological support for healthcare, and other key workers.
Prof. Evaldas Kazlauskas
Center for Psychotraumatology, Vilnius University
Prof. Evaldas Kazlauskas is a clinical psychologist and expert of trauma- and stress-related disorders. He is the President of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (2021-2022). Prof. Kazlauskas is the founder and Head of the Center for Psychotraumatology at Vilnius University in Lithuania. For the last two decades, his work has been dedicated to trauma recognition and advocating for the implementation of trauma-informed care. His current research is focused on the assessment and treatment of ICD-11 stress-related disorders, internet-based interventions for stress-related disorders, effects of trauma across the lifespan, effects of COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and adjustment.
PD Annett Lotzin
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
PD Dr. Annett Lotzin is a Senior Researcher at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany. She is an experienced researcher in the field of post-traumatic stress disorders, disaster mental health, and addictive disorders. Her current research focuses on secondary prevention and psychological treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder in refugees and patients with comorbidities. She is currently leading the pan-European ESTSS cohort study on stressors, coping, and symptoms of adjustment disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was a research fellow at the Phoenix Australia Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2019, she received the ESTSS Young Minds in Psychotraumatology Award. Last year, she was Editorial Fellow of the American Psychological Association's journal Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.
Assoc. Prof. Maja O’Connor
Aarhus University
The Danish National Center for Grief
Maja O’Connor is an associate professor of clinical psychology at Aarhus University, Denmark, a Senior Researcher at The Danish National Center for Grief and the founder and daily manager of Unit for Bereavement Research at Aarhus University. Her research focus on natural and complicated grief reactions with an emphasis on Prolonged Grief Disorder. She specializes in large-scale survey studies of prevalence, trajectories, and diagnostics of PGD as well as on the development of evidence based treatments for complicated grief reactions such as PGD, depression, PTSD, and anxiety following the loss of a loved one in adulthood. She is also involved in developing psychometric instruments for capturing PGD and co-operative inquiry methods for studying normal and complicated grief reactions.
Prof. Rita Rosner
Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt
Rita Rosner, Prof. Dr. Dipl.-Psych., Psychologische Psychotherapeutin, is currently the chair of Clinical and Biological Psychology at Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In the 1990ties, Prof Rosner studied the connections between flight, war, migration and psychological distress in the aftermath of the wars in former Yugoslavia. Current research projects focus on the treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in children and adolescents after sexual and physical abuse, migration specific aspects of service use after childhood abuse and the treatment of Prolonged Grief Disorder in adults.
From 2006-2008 Prof Rosner served as president of the Germanspeaking Society for Psychotraumatology, and from 2009-2015 as board member of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS). She is a co-founder and served as co-editor of the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) from 2010-2019.
Prof. Naomi Simon
NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Dr. Naomi Simon serves as the Vice Chair for Research Faculty Development and Mentoring, Professor in Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Director of the Anxiety and Complicated Grief Program. She has over 20 years of experience conducting clinical and translational research in anxiety, complicated grief, depression, and stress related disorders, including as a PI on multiple large clinical trials funded by the NIMH and Department of Defense. Her research seeks to understand the nature of anxiety, trauma and loss-related conditions and potential targets for treatment (e.g., fear acquisition and extinction processes).
Prof. Miguel Xavier
General-Directorate of Health
NOVA Medical School
Miguel Xavier (born 1963), M.D., PhD., is Full Professor of Psychiatry and Vice-Dean of NOVA Medical School, in Lisbon. He has been the national coordinator of several EU projects, in areas such as psychiatric epidemiology, mental health services planning and evaluation, forensic psychiatry and medical education. He is currently the Director of the National Program for Mental Health in Portugal.