Emma Woolf is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She studied English at Oxford University, then worked in psychology publishing for ten years before going freelance and writing a weekly column for The Times.

Emma is a regular arts critic on Radio 4’s Saturday Review, newspaper reviewer on Radio 5 Live and co-presenter on Channel 4’s Supersize vs Superskinny. She speaks internationally at Literary Festivals from Cheltenham to Mumbai.

Emma’s non-fiction books have been translated around the world, including the bestselling 'An Apple a Day (2012)', 'The Ministry of Thin' (2013), 'Letting Go' (2015), 'Positively Primal' (2016) 'The A-Z of Eating Disorders' (2017) and 'Wellbeing' (2019).

Her latest novel, 'England’s Lane', was widely praised as a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and redemption. Emma is the great-niece of Virginia Woolf.

Professor Tim Kendall is NHS England’s National Clinical Director for Mental Health. He has been Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health at the Royal College of Psychiatrists for 15 years and Visiting Professor at University College London for the last eight years.

Tim has also been Medical Director for 13 years and continues as Consultant Psychiatrist for the homeless at Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust.

As Medical Director, Tim has set up a service user experience monitoring unit, led the reconfiguration of acute care and rehabilitation leading to the elimination of out of area treatments, the modernisation of the acute and crisis care pathways and initiated the development of NICE recommended personality disorder services within the community.

He chaired the first NICE guideline, launched in December 2002, on the management of schizophrenia and the first National Quality Standard (Dementia) for NICE.

Tim has published numerous articles and papers and often represents the NCCMH, NICE or the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the media. In 2004, he was awarded “Lancet Paper of the Year” for showing the impact of selective publishing by the drug industry about antidepressants in the treatment of childhood depression; and with others was awarded the Paper of the Year Award for the Health Economic Journal ‘Value in Health’ in 2012 for work on schizophrenia.

Stephan Zipfel is Professor, head and chair of the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, University of Tuebingen, Germany.

He was trained at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the Royal Free Hospital London, UK and the Department of Psychological Medicine and the University of Sydney, Australia, in Internal Medicine and Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy. He is currently Vice Dean of the Medical Faculty of the University of Tuebingen, President of the German College of Psychosomatic Medicine (DKPM), Director of the Centre of Excellence for Eating Disorders (KOMET) and General Secretary of the International Federation of Psychotherapy (IFP).

Currently Stephan's research focuses on: a) Eating disorders and obesity, b) chronic pain disorders and somatoforme disorders (including IBS), c) neurobiology of placebo response, d) Psychooncology, e) refugee mental health (incl. posttraumatic stress disorders) and f) education research.

UIrike is the Professor of Eating Disorders at King’s College London and a Consultant Psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. She is also an NIHR Senior Investigator.

A key focus of her research is the development of brief scalable interventions. She has led the development of MANTRA, a NICE-recommended psychotherapy and of FREED, a multi-award winning early intervention programme. She has also pioneered the use of novel brain-directed treatments in eating disorders.

Ulrike was a member of the NICE Eating Disorders Guidelines development group, chair of the Eating Disorders Section at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a board member of the Academy for Eating Disorders. She has written some 450 peer-reviewed papers and many other publications.

Since 1999, Dr Trujillo has been the CEO and cofounder of the Comenzar de Nuevo International Outpatient and Residential Eating Disorders Treatment Center and the Comenzar de Nuevo AC Foundation for the Education, Prevention, Research, Advocacy and Treatment of Eating Disorders; Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the Escuela de Medicina y Ciencias de la Salud, Tecnologico de Monterrey, and Supervisor of new professionals of the Junior Professional Development Program and the Research Program from Comenzar de Nuevo.

She is Past President of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED). Her election marked a historic milestone in the global growth of the AED. Dr Trujillo was the first and only Latin American to ascend to the AED Presidency and being a board member for 9 years.

Dr Trujillo graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey where she was Chief Resident of Pediatrics. She also earned her medical degree, Magna Cum Laude, from that university. She did studies in Adolescent Medicine at the Adolescent and Young Adult Clinical Practice of the Boston Children´s Hospital of Harvard University.

She has been extensively trained with workshops and certifications since 1996. She has more than 300 hours of training in different evidence-based treatment modalities for eating disorders, prevention and research. Reviewer for numerous international journals on eating disorders and member of national and international scientific committees. She has spoken and presented papers around the world with currently more than 250 presentations in all continents and published many scientific papers, books and book chapters in the field.

Stephanie Bauer is the Director of the Center for Psychotherapy Research at the University Hospital Heidelberg (Germany). She obtained her PhD in psychology from the University of Tuebingen in 2004 and her habilitation from the University of Heidelberg in 2013.

Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of digital interventions for the prevention and treatment of mental illness. Specifically, with her team, she investigates the potential of such tools to facilitate the timely identification of eating disorders and to improve both the quality and continuity of care. Furthermore, she studies barriers that prevent affected individuals from seeking and receiving adequate treatment as well as means to enhance treatment uptake and adherence.

In 2017-2018 she served as president of the Academy for Eating Disorders.

Ashok Malla is currently an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University. As a tenured professor with an adjunct appointment in Epidemiology and Biostatistics he held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Early Psychosis and Early Intervention in Youth Mental Health (2003-2020).

He is a recipient of an honorary doctorate from l’Université de Montréal, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and an editor of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. He has been an international leader in Early Intervention in Psychosis since the mid 1990s and Youth Mental Health since 2013.

In addition to investigating multidimensional outcomes in psychosis, early intervention models of service delivery and global mental health, recently (2014-2020) he led a $25M, CIHR funded pan-Canadian research project on transformation of youth mental health services (ACCESS OPEN MINDS).

He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles, supervised many graduate and post-doctoral trainees and been a strong advocate of access to evidence informed high quality care for the seriously mentally ill.

Beate Herpertz-Dahlmann has specialised in paediatrics and child and adolescent psychiatry. Since 1997 she has been Chair and Clinical Director of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the Technical Excellence University of Aachen.

For more than 30 years her research field has been the aetiology and treatment of adolescent AN. She co-authored the German guidelines for eating disorders in 2018 and established the new treatment strategies day patient and home treatment for anorexia nervosa. She is member of the anorexia nervosa research group of the European Brain Council.

Previously she has been President of the German Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Board member of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and of the German Society of Eating Disorders as well as a member of the expert council “Neurosciences” of the German Research Society (DFG).

Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor Tracey Wade has worked as a clinician in the area of eating disorders for 30 years and her current research interests are in the aetiology, prevention and treatment of eating disorders, with a focus on implementing this research into real world settings to improve outcomes in body image and eating disorders.

She has cowritten 3 therapy books and has over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals. In 2015 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In 2016 she was made an Inaugural Honorary Fellow of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy. In 2017-18 she was the president of the Eating Disorder Research Society, and in 2018-2020 she was a member of the Million Minds Expert Advisory Panel. In 2019 she was appointed Fellow of the APS, and is currently an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

She is the director of the Flinders University Services for Eating Disorders (FUSED) and the Blackbird Research Initiative. Professor Wade is a member of the National Eating Disorders Collaboration steering committee commissioned by the Federal Government to inform policy development in the area of eating disorder prevention and treatment, and a member of the Eating Disorders Technical Advisory Committee, advising the Federal Department of Health on matters related to eating disorders.

Barbara Franke holds the Chair of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she is based at the Human Genetics and Psychiatry departments of the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc). She is also a Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour.

At Radboudumc, she heads the Division of Genome Research and the Radboud Research Theme Neurodevelopmental Disorders. She is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and of Academia Europaea.

Educated in Giessen (Germany) and Utrecht (The Netherlands), she obtained her PhD in molecular signal-transduction in Utrecht before joining Radboud University. Her research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders, especially ADHD and its comorbidities.

Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches (bioinformatics, i-neurons, small animal models, neuroimaging genetics) to map biological pathways from gene to disease. She has obtained prestigious grants, including a personal Vici grant from the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research and several EU consortium grants.

She founded and coordinates the International Multicentre persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network ‘ADHD across the Lifespan’, is a co-founder of ENIGMA, and is one of two leaders each of ENIGMA’s ADHD Working Group and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s ADHD Working Group.

In 2018, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics. Since 2019, she holds an honorary Adjunct Professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Barbara Franke has (co-)authored over 400 peer reviewed publications and is on Clavirate’s list of the 1% most highly cited researchers worldwide.

Dr Christine Peat is the Director of the National Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders (NCEED) and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As the Director of NCEED, Dr Peat is focused on broadly disseminating education and training on eating disorders to healthcare providers across a variety of disciplines. Her research centres on eating pathology across the spectrum, but with a distinct focus on binge-eating disorder. She is particularly interested in the intersection between obesity, bariatric surgery, and eating pathology and investigating physiological comorbidities associated with eating disorders.


Dr Peat is also a licensed psychologist in North Carolina and as such, treats eating disorders across the spectrum. She also provides both psychotherapy and behavioral medicine interventions to bariatric surgery patients.

In addition to her clinical and research responsibilities, Dr Peat is a clinical supervisor for pre-doctoral psychology interns, psychiatry residents, and mentors undergraduate students.

Elizabeth A Lawson is a clinician in the Neuroendocrine Clinical Center and a faculty member in the Neuroendocrine Unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

She is a clinical researcher and Director of the Interdisciplinary Oxytocin Research Program. In addition to her research on oxytocin, Dr. Lawson studies endocrine regulation of eating behavior and metabolism in eating disorders and obesity.

Awards in recognition of her work have included the MGH Claflin Distinguished Scholar Award and Endocrine Society's Early Investigators Award. She is author of more than 85 peer-reviewed publications.

Annemarie van Elburg is child & adolescent psychiatrist at Rintveld, Center for Eating Disorders, Altrecht Mental Health Institute. She holds a chair at the Dept. of Clinical Psychology, Faculty for Social Sciences at Utrecht University.

She founded (together with Roger Adan) and heads the Utrecht Research Group Eating Disorders (URGE). She combines clinical practice with research and teaching and has served on national and international boards of eating disorder associations.

Her interests are varied, clinically she is involved in the treatment of young people with EDs, her research interests are neurobiologically based, but also relate to chronicity, mental competence and recovery. She teaches medical and psychological students, psychology and (child-)psychiatry trainees, psychotherapists and nurses on Eds, edited the 'Dutch Handbook for Eating Disorders', and was involved in the development of the Dutch Guidelines for Eating Disorders.

Recently, she functioned on a government committee, concerned with improving treatment of young people with EDs.

Professor Stephen Touyz is Professor of Clinical Psychology in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney and Honorary Associate in the Discipline of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney. He is the Chair of the advisory council and a Lead Researcher for the InsideOut Institute – Australia’s first institute for research and clinical excellence in eating disorders that aims to provide every Australian living with an eating disorder, access to the best possible care, by re-thinking eating disorders from the “inside out”. Prof Touyz has served as a Mental Health Advisor to the Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs Health Program since 1994. He was also the inaugural treasurer of the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Eating Disorders and a past president of the Eating Disorders Research Society (USA). He is the founding Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Eating Disorders and a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of the International Journal of Eating Disorders and European Eating Disorders Review. He is also a member of the Steering Committee of the National Collaboration on Eating Disorders (funded by the Commonwealth of Australia) and Co-Chair of the Professional Development Sub-Committee. Professor Touyz is also Chair of the Shire Australasian Binge Eating Disorder advisory committee. Professor Touyz has been the recipient of numerous research grants from Australia’s leading research funding bodies. He has written seven books, one of which has been translated into both Italian and Japanese, over 350 papers/book chapters and 430 conference abstracts. In 2012, he was given the prestigious Leadership in Research Award by the Academy of Eating Disorders (USA) in recognition of his pioneering research in the field of eating disorders. In 2014, he was awarded the first Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Eating Disorders and the Ian Campbell Memorial Prize by the Clinical College of the Australian Psychological Society for his outstanding contribution to the profession.

Born in 1963 in Seville, Fernando Fernandez-Aranda, Specialist in Clinical Psychologist, has been the Director of the Eating Disorders (ED) Unit at the Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital Bellvitge since 2003. He has also been Head of Group CIBERobn (Excellent Spanish Research Network for Obesity and Nutrition) since 2007 and Full Professor since 2010 (School of Medicine, UB), at the same university. He obtained his PhD in Psychology in 1996 at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and his BP in 1990 (Clinical Psychology) at the University of Barcelona. His previous appointments were as a Clinical Psychologist at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Hamburg (1994-1995), long-term Predoctoral Research Fellow in Hannover, Germany (1992-1993) and Consultant Psychologist at the Department of Psychiatry, HUB in Barcelona (1996-03). He was Invited Professor at the University of North Carolina (2005) and at the McGill University in Montreal between 2009 and 2015. He has given more than 300 invited lectures at international and national psychology, psychiatry and nutrition/endocrinology conferences, and is actively involved as a supervisor in continuous teaching in eating disorders (ED), and is member of several international professional associations (AED, ED Research Society). He is Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED), Editor in Chief of European Eating Disorders Review (since 2011) and has been awarded with the Meehan Hartley Award for Public Service and/or Advocacy-2004, Leadership Research Award-2015, and Hilde Bruch Lecture Award-2017 (University of Tübingen, Germany). He has received several additional awards on development and innovation (Best European Video Game for Health-2011; Best Spanish Research Ideas-Diario Medico 2011). He has been IP in several international/ EU grants (12) and in national grants (20). Fernando has published more than 330 English peer-reviewed manuscripts in international journals. He is currently President of the Eating Disorders Research Society (EDRS) and Co-Chair of the ED Section of the WPA (2018-2023). He is the current Chair of the Research Committee of the University Hospital of Bellvitge (2019-22) and Member of the Advisory Board of Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Links of relevance: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=4IiGuywAAAAJ&hl=en Pubmed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=fernandez-aranda ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2968-9898

Howard Steiger directs Quebec’s only large-scale, specialised eating disorders programme - the Douglas Institute Eating Disorders Continuum (EDC). The EDC offers a full range of inpatient, day treatment and outpatient services for adolescents and adults touched by EDs and their families. He is Professor in Psychiatry and Associate Member in Psychology at McGill University. An active clinician, researcher, and teacher, Steiger has published numerous articles and chapters on the eating disorders. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Eating Disorders, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders, and has been Associate Editor of the International Journal of Eating Disorders, President of the ED Research Society, Co-President of the Quebec Charter for a Healthy and Diversified Body Image, and Member of the Academy for EDs executive. Through the research arm of the Douglas EDC, Steiger and his colleagues study: a) Genetic and epigenetic processes acting in ED development and maintenance. b) Factors that influence response to specialized treatments. c) Effects of system-wide knowledge transfer and prevention efforts, and d) Other processes relevant to the causes and treatment of EDs.

Annemarie van Elburg is child & adolescent psychiatrist at Rintveld, Center for Eating Disorders, Altrecht Mental Health Institute. She holds a chair at the Department of Clinical Psychology, Faculty for Social Sciences at Utrecht University. She founded (together with Roger Adan) and heads the Utrecht Research Group Eating Disorders (URGE). She combines clinical practice with research and teaching and has served on national and international boards of eating disorder associations. Her interests are varied, clinically she is involved in the treatment of young people with EDs, her research interests are neurobiologically based, but also relate to chronicity, mental competence and recovery. She teaches medical and psychological students, psychology and (child) psychiatry trainees, psychotherapists and nurses on EDs, edited the Dutch Handbook for Eating Disorders, and was involved in the development of the Dutch Guidelines for Eating Disorders. Recently, she participated in a government committee, concerned with improving treatment of young people with EDs.

Emma Woolf is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She studied English at Oxford University, then worked in psychology publishing for ten years before going freelance and writing a weekly column for The Times. Emma is a presenter and arts critic on Radio 4’s Saturday Review, newspaper reviewer on Radio 5 Live, regular on many radio shows across the BBC and co-presenter on Channel 4’s Supersize vs Superskinny. She speaks internationally at Literary Festivals from Cheltenham to Mumbai. Emma is a spokesperson and campaigner for many issues around women’s health and wellbeing, particularly in the area of eating disorders, body image and mental health. Emma’s non-fiction books have been translated around the world, including the bestselling An Apple a Day (2012), The Ministry of Thin (2013), Letting Go (2015), Positively Primal (2016) The A-Z of Eating Disorders (2017) and Wellbeing (2019). Her novel England’s Lane was published in the UK and US, and was widely praised as a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and redemption. Emma is the great-niece of Virginia Woolf.

Eric van Furth, PhD, FAED is Director at Rivierduinen Eating Disorders Ursula, a centre of excellence for eating disorders in Leiden, the Netherlands. He is also Professor of Eating Disorders at the department of psychiatry, Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and former chair of the Dutch Academy for Eating Disorders.

Nadia Micali, MD, MRCPsych, PhD, FAED, is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Geneva and head of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division, Geneva University Hospital, where she has set up from scratch a service for Child and Adolescent feeding and eating disorders, focusing on evidence-based treatment. She leads a research lab focusing on risk factors, neurobiology and treatment of feeding and eating disorders. She is also Associate Professor at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child health, UCL, London.