Karen Flegg

Prof Karen Flegg is a family doctor from Australia, who has practiced mostly in rural and very remote areas.  Most recently she has been working in Central Australia with Australia’s first nations peoples.  

She is an Associate Professor in the Rural Clinical School, of the Australian National University.  Karen has been actively involved as an educator in both undergraduate and postgraduate specialty training for general practice for over 20 years.  Teaching and mentoring the next generation of specialised general practitioners is an ongoing passion.

Karen is well known to WONCA members, having served as WONCA Editor for 10 years, until December 2020.  She has also served on WONCA Executive, as a Member-at-large, from 2013 to 2018.  She has served on the boards of directors of numerous medical / general practice organisations, often taking on roles relating to finance, audit or governance and bylaws. She has obtained the Fellowship of three WONCA Member Organisations – the Royal Australian College of GPs, the Royal New Zealand College of GPs and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine. 

Clinically, Karen has a strong interest in Aboriginal Health, women’s health, and has worked part time for many years in breast clinics and also a sexual assault crisis service. Geriatrics is another favoured part of her clinical work as she enjoys interacting with the older generation and working with them for best outcomes. 

María Pilar Astier-Peña

Prof María Pilar Astier-Peña is a specialist in Family and Community Medicine and Preventive Medicine and Public Health. She currently serves as a Family Doctor at a Primary Health Care Centre in Zaragoza, Spain. Alongside her clinical duties, she holds the position of Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Zaragoza, where she mentors medical students and actively participates in multi-professional teaching units focusing on family and community medicine, as well as family nursing residency programs. She is also mentor of family medicine residents.
Driven by her commitment to patient safety and healthcare quality, she holds leadership roles as the Chair of the Patient Safety Working Party at the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (SEMFYC), and as a member of various international bodies such as EQUIP (The Quality and Safety Network in WONCA Europe), and as vice-chair of the Policy Advocacy Working Party of Wonca Europe. Additionally, at WONCA World level she contributes her expertise as a member of the Quality and Safety Working Party and a Member-at-Large on the WONCA World Executive Committee for the term 2023-2025.
Her primary research focus lies in enhancing patient safety and healthcare quality, with a specific emphasis on primary healthcare, physicians' health and wellbeing, and the enhancement of clinical reasoning as a core competency among family doctors. ORCID Number: 0000-0002-3192-7672

Susan Smith

Prof Susan Smith is Professor of General Practice at Trinity College Dublin and works as a General Practitioner at Inchicore Family Doctors in Dublin 8. Her research interests include improving outcomes for patients with multimorbidity and related clinical issues such as medicines management. She has been the PI or Co-PI on eight RCTs of interventions for chronic disease management in Irish primary care settings and has just commenced a national three arm cluster RCT evaluating two interventions for people with multimorbidity taking ten or more medicines, GP based pharmacists and link workers providing social prescribing. She is an editor and author with the Cochrane Collaboration and is Clinical Lead for the HRB Evidence Synthesis for Clinical Guidelines programme, which supports production of Ireland’s Clinical Guidelines. She also has an interest in health equity and coordinates the Deep End Ireland Group, which advocates for needs-based resource allocation for primary care services for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.

Shlomo Vinker

Tomas Zapata

Dr Tomas Zapata is a medical doctor specialised in Family Medicine in Spain. He holds a Master’s degree in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing from LSHTM and LSE and a specialised course on Human Resources for Health by Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Tomas Zapata leads the Health Workforce and Service Delivery Unit in the WHO Regional Office for Europe based in Copenhagen. He has more than 13 years of experience in policy advice, research, and programme implementation on health workforce and service delivery, in more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Ana Luisa Neves

Dr Ana Luisa Neves is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in Digital Health and Director of the Global Digital Health Unit (GDHU), a research hub for innovation and entrepreneurship in health care. In line with the aims of the School of Public Health, the mission of the Global Digital Health Unit is to develop innovative, evidence-based solutions for delivering healthcare and health promotion, and for supporting public health research. We are a multidisciplinary team, collaborating on a number of local, national and international activities.
Dr Ana Luisa Neves leads a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, conducting research in digital health, with a focus on the use of digital technologies to deliver safer, more effective, and patient-centred care. She has more than 15 years of research experience, and >40 papers published in peer-reviewed journals (>3,000 citations), using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
Ana qualified in Medicine and completed specialist training in General Practice, and has worked as a medical doctor in both high- and low-income countries. She undertook academic and research placements at Institut National de la Santé et Recherche Médicale (Paris) and at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School Affiliate (Boston), before obtaining her PhD in Clinical Medicine at Imperial College London (2018). Between 2017-2023, Ana took a variety of research roles at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial, the latest being as Associate Director / Advanced Research Fellow at Imperial NIHR Patient Safety Translational Research (PSTRC). As part of this role, Ana also oversaw the academic support to the WHO Global Patient Safety Collaborative, a multi-national consortium designed to strengthen leadership, capacity building and research development in low and middle-income countries.
In what concerns teaching activities, she is the Module Lead for Digital Health in the Masters Public Health and Global Master of Public Health at Imperial College London. Ana is also Module Lead (Health Data Collection and Principles of Health Data Science) at the PhD Programme in Health Data Science at University of Porto, where she holds a post as Associate Professor.
Dr Ana Luisa Neves is currently an elected member of the Executive Board of the European General Practice Research Network and of the Working Party on eHealth of the World Organisation of General Practice

Alexandre Gouveia

Dr Alexandre Gouveia is a family physician with a specialization in Family Medicine (Portugal) and General Internal Medicine (Switzerland). After his initial undergraduate and postgraduate training in Portugal, he worked for 5 years in a Family Health Unit in Viana do Castelo, Northern Portugal. During that period, he was a guest lecturer in Community Health at the School of Health Sciences of the University of Minho in Braga, a member of the Executive Board of the Portuguese Association of General Practice and Family Medicine (APMGF) and served as the Portuguese delegate in EQUiP. Dr. Alexandre Gouveia is currently the head of the Policlinique de médecine générale, a postgraduate training unit at Unisanté (Center for Primary Care and Public Health, University of Lausanne). He serves as one of the Swiss delegates at the WONCA Europe Council, representing the Swiss Society of General Internal Medicine (SSGIM). In addition to his clinical, teaching, and research activities, he is currently attending the Master of Medical Sciences in Medical Education at Harvard Medical School.

Niels H. Chavannes

Prof Dr Niels H. Chavannes MD, PhD, graduated in Medicine at Maastricht University, the Netherlands in 1998. He combined his specialization as a Family Physician (2003) with several diagnostic and therapeutic studies in primary care, resulting in his 2005 PhD thesis: “Tracking and treating COPD in Primary Care: An integrated approach to diagnosis and therapy” at the CAPHRI Research Institute of Maastricht University. In 2006 his team received the National Public Health Stimulation Award for the Kroonluchter COPD Project, implementing a highly successful integrated COPD management program.

Clinical Care: In Rotterdam he was involved in setting up an innovative multidisciplinary health care center in a deprived area since 2003, and practised there as a Family Physician in an integrated primary healthcare team. After working as a part-time Family Physician in Zeist, he now enjoys working at the Streetdoctor Group in Rotterdam, taking care of the homeless and deprived at the inner city Pauluskerk.

Current Positions: In 2015 he was appointed as a Full Professor of Primary Care Medicine, Strategic Chair of eHealth Applications in Disease Management, and in 2016 he became Head of Research at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Leiden University Medical Center. In 2020 his Chair was continued as eHealth Applications in Population Health Management and he became Chair of the Theme Prevention and Lifestyle within the Research Council of LUMC. He is an Associate Editor of the Nature Partnering Journal Primary Care Respiratory Medicine (Impact Factor 3.2). He is a Visiting Professor at the Respiratory Research Institute at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Together with prof Chunxue Bai of Fudan University he is co-chief editor of the novel KeAi/Elsevier-backed journal Clinical eHealth. He is the Vice-Chair of the Dutch Asthma and COPD Advisory Group (CAHAG) and the National Advisor of the Dutch Action Program on Chronic Lung Diseases of the Lung Alliance Netherlands (LAN). In March 2018 he opened the National eHealth Living Lab, a patient-centered multidisciplinary Open Science platform to scale up a large number of eHealth initiatives in an evidence-based manner, currently running 92 studies, using innovative eHealth methodology and stimulating public-private partnerships.

Past positions: He spent two years as a Consultant Family Physician at United Family Hospital in Shanghai, China, combined with an Assistant Professorship at Leiden University Medical Center, 2008-10. He is the past President of the International Primary Care Respiratory Group, and formerly associate Editor BMC Family Practice (Impact Factor 2.1), former Chair of the General Practice and Primary Care Scientific Group at the European Respiratory Society (www.ersnet.org) and former Planning Committee Member of the Global Alliance against Respiratory Diseases at the World Health Organization. He co-authored the 2004 ATS/ERS COPD Guidelines, as well as the 2008 ARIA Guidelines and the Dutch Primary Care Standards for Asthma, COPD, and Smoking Cessation (2007, revised in 2015 and 2017) as well as the multidisciplinary Tobacco Dependence and Smoking Cessation Guideline (2016).

Research: He has been supervising 42 PhD students, of whom 12 now have graduated, two cum laude. His multidisciplinary team currently consists of 8 postdocs, 5 assistant professors and 4 associate professors with clinical, psychological, epidemiological and biomedical expertise, and several projects are embedded in the Medical Delta eHealth Institute, of which Chavannes is one of the founders. He published over 300 peer-reviewed articles on topics like eHealth and mHealth, medication adherence, rehabilitation, asthma, COPD, smoking cessation, self-management and disease management programs in primary care and hospital to home setting. He contributed to 18 books as first author and 7 books as second or last author. He has been a member of over 60 different committees and raised over € 52 million in funding over the past 15 years.