Aaron Kelly

University of Minnesota Medical School , Minneapolis, MN, USA

Dr. Kelly is a Professor of Pediatrics, the Minnesota American Legion and Auxiliary Chair in Children’s Health, and the Co-Director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.  He has over 20 years of experience conducting clinical trials for the treatment of pediatric obesity and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers on related topics.  Dr. Kelly’s NIH-funded research program focuses primarily on obesity pharmacotherapy but extends to all types of weight management interventions.  His work also seeks to identify and characterize predictors of treatment response to advance the discipline of precision obesity medicine and improve care delivery for children and adolescents with obesity.  Dr. Kelly is actively involved in numerous initiatives related to pediatric obesity treatment in the United States and internationally, has held various leadership positions in The Obesity Society and American Heart Association, and is a Fellow of both organizations. 

Abdullah Bereket

University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey

Prof. Bereket has graduated from Ankara University, Medical School in 1986. After finishing pediatric residency training in 1991, he completed his fellowship in Pediatric Endocrinology at  State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA  in 1991-1996.  He was appointed as Assistant Professor at Hacettepe University of Ankara in 1997.  In 1999, he founded Pediatric Endocrinology division at Marmara University of Istanbul and is currently chief of the division and subspecialty training program.  He was granted full professorship in 2003.  Dr Bereket authored more than 160 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. He was awarded as outstanding young  scientist by Turkish Academy of Sciences in 2001. He is a member of European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) and  served in board of ESPE Bone Club and ESPE Summer school steering commitee in 2011-2015.  He has served as, treasurer, vice president and President of Turkish Pediatric Endocrin Society between 2001-2007. He is associate editor of Journal of Clinical Research in Pediatric Endocrinology, Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism and in the editorial board of Hormone Research in Pediatrics. His main research interests are insulin-like growth factors, obesity, precocious puberty, and rickets.

Bassam Bin Abbas

King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Dr. Bassam Saleh Bin-Abbas is a Consultant in the Section of Endocrinology and Diabetes, Department of Pediatrics at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is also a Professor of Pediatrics and Endocrinology at the Al-Faisal University. In the USA, he obtained certification at the American Board of Pediatrics after completing his residency program at Yale University in 1997 and American Board of Pediatric Endocrinology after his fellowship training at UCSF/Stanford University in 1999.

Jason Halford

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Jason Halford is Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds, President of the European Association of Obesity (EASO), and former Chair of the UK Association for the Study of Obesity (ASO).  He is a Chartered Health Psychologist. Over the past 10 years his research has focused on drug-induced weight gain, the effects of nutrients and fibre on appetite and hormone release, the effects of stress on eating behaviour, the effect of marketing on children, and on lean-obese differences in the expression of appetite.  In 1999, Jason co-founded the Human Ingestive Behaviour Laboratory at Liverpool and in 2004 he also co-founded the Liverpool Obesity Research Network (LORN).  Jason is co-ordinator of the SWITCH study, a new trial to examine the impact of artificial sweeteners on appetite in the context of active weight management and is one of the co-ordinating leads for the 9m Euro H2020 SWEET project designed to examine the risks and benefits of using sweeteners to replace sugar in the diet in the contexts of health, obesity, safety and sustainability.  Jason is also local lead for iKnowFood.  Additionally, he is a Board member of the European Coalition of People Living with Obesity (ECPO) and is also the Lead of the ACTION-Teens Study which looks at the experiences of adolescents living with obesity globally.