Dr. Ruud Nijman
Faculty of Medicine, Department of Infectious Disease

Ruud Nijman is a specialty registrar in Paediatric Emergency Medicine, currently working at St. Mary’s hospital. He is an NIHR academic clinical lecturer at Imperial College in the platform Science (-omics techniques and advanced bioinformatics), with a special interest in diagnostics and clinical decision making in children presenting to emergency departments with acute infections. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in London, he was redeployed to work in the paediatric intensive care unit, looking after critically unwell adults with COVID-19.

He originally obtained his medical degree at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Prior to his move to London in 2013 to work with Prof. Maconochie at Imperial College, he completed his PhD in paediatrics and clinical epidemiology at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on the topic of diagnostic strategies for children with fever at risk of serious bacterial infection presenting to emergency care. He also completed an MSc in Clinical Epidemiology at the Netherlands Institute of Health Sciences.

He is currently working within the PERFORM and DIAMONDS projects (chief investigator: Prof. Levin, Imperial College): large, multi centre European studies recruiting children with acute infections with the aim to discover and validate new biomarkers to differentiate viral and bacterial infections. The DIAMONDS study was unique placed to investigate the Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C). Ruud is chief investigator of the EPISODES study; an observational study looking at children presenting to emergency departments across Europe, recruiting patients from some 40 hospitals in 16 European countries. Ruud is a member of the REPEM (Research in European Paediatric Emergency Medicine) steering committee and the executive committee of the EUSEM (European. Society of Emerge cy Medicine) paediatric branch society

Berthold V. Koletzko
Research Biosketch

Dr. med. Dr. med. habil. Dr. h.c. mult., Else Kröner Seniorprofessor of Paediatrics, Professor h.c., LMU-Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Head, Div. Metabolic & Nutritional Medicine, Dr. von Hauner Children’s Hospital, LMU University Hospitals, Munich
My career goal to work as a physician scientist and to advance child health by combining clinical paediatric medicine, clinical investigation, and laboratory based biomedical research is motivated by:
– early clinical pediatric work in South Africa (Baragwanath Hospital, Johannesburg-Soweto) and Tanzania (Kilimanjaro Christian Medical
Center, Moshi), where I experienced dramatic consequences of childhood malnutrition but realised that our understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms by which nutrition induces morbidity and mortality is still limited in many aspects,
– work with children with inborn errors of metabolism, who often require very restrictive diets where apparently minor metabolic derangements can have dramatic adverse effects,
– the view that effective disease prevention rather than treatment is particularly important during childhood but requires detailed understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms.