Speakers

Dr. Louis Aronne is a leading authority on obesity and its treatment. He is the Sanford I. Weill Professor of Metabolic Research and the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center, a state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary obesity research, education, and treatment center in the division of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism at Weill Cornell Medicine. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. Aronne is a founder and past chairman of the American Board of Obesity Medicine and a past president of The Obesity Society. He is the founder and Chief Scientific Advisor of Intellihealth a cloud-based weight management system which delivers obesity treatment online as Flyte.

Henry R. Kranzler, M.D. is the Karl E. Rickels Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Studies of Addiction at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and Co-Associate Director for Research in the Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center at the Crescenz VAMC. His research focuses on the genetics, neuroimaging, and pharmacological treatment of substance use disorders, including pharmacogenetics. His research has been continuously supported since 1987 by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs and he has authored more than 700 journal articles, book chapters, or books.

Dr. Rohit Loomba is a Professor of Medicine (with tenure), Chief, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, at the University of California at San Diego. He is an internationally recognized thought leader in translational research and innovative clinical trial design in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and non-invasive assessment of liver disease using advanced imaging modalities.

Dr. Loomba is the founding director of the UCSD MASLD Research Center, which fosters collaborative team science where a multi-disciplinary team of researchers are conducting cutting edge research in all aspects of NAFLD including non-invasive biomarkers, genetics, epidemiology, clinical trial design, imaging end-points, and integrated OMICs using microbiome, metabolome and lipidome. This integrated approach has led to several innovative applications such as establishment of MRI-PDFF as a non-invasive biomarker of treatment response in early phase trials in NASH, which has now been adopted in more than 100 clinical trials conducted worldwide. He holds several patents on non-invasive biomarkers of NASH and fibrosis.

His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health as a Principal Investigator including two R01s, three U01 (two NIDDK and one from NIAAA), clinical core director of P30 (NIDDK) and project director P01 (NHLBI) grant mechanisms, Foundation of NIH, as well as several large multicenter, multi-million dollar investigator initiated research projects funded by the industry. He is the Principal Investigator, UCSD, for the NIDDK-sponsored NASH Clinical Research Network and the Liver Cirrhosis Network. He also serves as on the Scientific Advisory Board of numerous biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies and guides clinical drug development and biomarker discovery programs globally.

He serves on the Editorial Board of Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, GUT and Nature Reviews in Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He recently completed a 5-year term as the Deputy Editor of HEPATOLOGY, the official journal of the AASLD. Currently, he serves as the co-Editor of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, an international journal in the field of gastroenterology and Hepatology. Dr. Loomba has published more than 500 manuscripts and has an H-index of 145. He has been consistently listed among the top 1% of the globally highly cited scientists across all fields since 2019 by Web of Science. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).

Mazen Noureddin, MD, MHSc, did his internal medicine residency at the University of Southern California (USC) and then moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he enrolled in a three-year hepatology fellowship at the Liver Diseases Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). There, he finished the NIH/Duke University Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research program. After completing his NIH fellowship, he completed a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he was a T32 NIH fellow. He joined the University of Southern California (USC) as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine in 2013. He was then recruited to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2015 and was appointed as the founding director of Fatty Liver Program.

Dr. Noureddin is internationally known for his research in the area of MASLD/MASH and MASH related cirrhosis. He conducted more than 70 investigational clinical studies of novel treatments for MASH. He is an expert in non-invasive testing and biomarkers of NASH and cirrhosis. He has published in all these areas and has been invited to consensus panels on these topics by multiple international societies including the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (EASL), Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver (APASL) and Latin American Association for the Study of the Liver (ALEH). He has given invited lectures on MASLD/MASH at national and international society meetings and serves on several steering committees/advisory boards for industry. He is chair of the AASLD MASLD special interest group and has served on the editorial board for major GI journals including “Gastroenterology”, “Hepatology” and “Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CGH)”. He is an Associate Editor for “Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology (CGH)”. Dr. Noureddin has been funded by the National Cancer Institute and has served as a reviewer on NIH study sections. He has published >260 papers in many journals including: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Nature Medicine, Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Science Translational Medicine, Journal of Hepatology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology and others.

In May 2022, Dr. Noureddin moved to Houston, He is currently a Professor of Medicine at the Lynda K. and David M. Underwood Center for Digestive Disorders J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center Sherrie & Alan Conover Center for Liver Disease & Transplantation at Houston Methodist Hospital (currently ranked #5 in GI and GI surgery by US News). He has also established the Houston Research Institute which is State of the Art facility that offers patients with liver disease access to new innovative non-invasive diagnostic tests and breakthrough therapies. Dr. Noureddin also server as the Chief Scientific Officer for Summit Clinical Research.