Professor of Pediatrics and Interdisciplinary Transplantation
Consultant Pediatric Nephrologist, Dean for Academic Career Development
Hannover Medical School, Germany

Anette Melk, MD PhD is Professor of Pediatrics and Interdisciplinary Transplantation and serves Hannover Medical School as Dean for Academic Career Development. She is the current chair of Pillar 2 of Women in Transplantation.

Dr. Melk’s clinical research aims to decipher factors leading to cardiovascular and renal comorbidity in children with chronic kidney disease and transplantation. She has demonstrated that girls are particularly vulnerable to certain risk factors and experience more severe cardiovascular damage. She showed that female patients have lesser waitlist access and that younger female patients experience greater rates of graft loss and death.

She has organized two international symposia on the topic of sex and gender in transplantation medicine. For her advocacy and work on the topic Dr. Melk received the Future Award of the German Society of Nephrology in 2023.

Chair, Department of Pediatrics
McGill University

Dr. Bethany Foster is a Professor of Pediatrics, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at McGill University and Pediatrician-in-Chief at the McGill University Health Centre. She is a clinical epidemiologist with a primary research interest in the long term outcomes of children and young adults with kidney transplants. Dr. Foster has been funded by CIHR and NIH to study immunosuppressive medication adherence, graft outcomes in adolescent and young adult kidney transplant recipients, whom she has identified to be at particularly high risk of graft loss. She has included patient partners in her adherence studies. She has also highlighted important differences in renal allograft outcomes by recipient sex, the magnitude and direction of which vary by recipient age and by donor sex. Dr. Foster has over 110 peer-reviewed publications and is an Associate Editor of the international journal Transplantation. She is also Past-Chair of The Transplantation Society’s Women in Transplantation initiative.

Professor Pediatrics, Surgery, Immunology, Laboratory Medicine & Pathology
University of Alberta

Dr. Lori West is a Professor of Pediatrics, Surgery, Medical Microbiology/Immunology and Laboratory Medicine/Pathology at the University of Alberta and Director of the Alberta Transplant Institute. A clinician-scientist, she has longstanding interest and expertise in pediatric heart transplantation and transplant immunology, particularly related to ABO glycoimmunology. Her pioneering work on crossing ABO-barriers led to global impact on infant heart transplantation. Dr. West is also the founding Director of the Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program, a national research coalition funded since 2013 by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Together with founding co-Director Dr. Marie-Josée Hébert, the CDTRP framework has grown to encompass collaborations in all streams of research with hundreds of investigators at 37 sites across Canada. Dr. West previously held the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Heart Transplantation. She is past-president of the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation and the Canadian Society of Transplantation, recent past-chair of the Women in Transplantation international initiative of The Transplantation Society, and served as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Transplantation. She is also an honorary lifetime member of the British Society of Transplantation. A Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Dr. West was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2022. Dr. West is also the recipient of the 2024 ISHLT Lifetime Achievement Award.

Transplant Nephrologist
University of Sydney and Westmead Hospital

Germaine Wong is a transplant nephrologist, Director of Western Renal Service at Westmead Hospital, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, NHMRC. Leadership Fellow at the University of Sydney, and Co-Director of Clinical. Research at Centre for Kidney Research, Children’s Hospital at Westmead. She is the current Chair of the Women in Transplantation and Associate Editor of Kidney International (KI) and Transplantation. She has an internationally recognised track record in transplant epidemiology, cancer and transplantation, social ethics in organ allocation, decision analytical modelling, health economics, and quality of life studies in transplant recipients.