Welcome to our first IPTA-VES - International Pediatric Transplant Association Virtual Education Symposium. This symposium is open to all members and trainees of the clinical and academic multi-disciplinary teams in pediatric transplantation. After many successful years of IPTA Fellow Meetings, we have arranged this teaching so it is available to all those skilled staff working with children and their families in the field of transplantation.
The International Pediatric Transplant Association (IPTA) Virtual Education Symposium is open to IPTA and TTS members.
This interactive symposium is over two half days on Thursday and Friday 14 and 15 November 2024, commencing with two separate streams for medics and for allied health and nursing professionals.
This is an educational symposium which aims to cover both basic and advanced subjects for all trainee and staff physicians and surgeons and as well as members of the allied health and nursing professionals, including psychosocial teams.
Abstracts will not be accepted unless conform to these guidelines
Please submit abstracts, written in English with Arial font 10 in Word document with abstract title limited to 30 words (without abbreviations in title) and abstract length up to 500 words (including any pictures, charts or tables noting only one jpg picture, chart or table allowed) with up to five total authors.
Please state the presenting author and if this author is trainee physician / trainee surgeon / medical student / allied health professional / nursing professional / student nurse / student allied health professionals.
Please state category of abstract: kidney / liver / heart / lung / liver / stem cell / bone marrow / multi-organ / ethics / psychosocial.
Please structure your abstract as Aims / Methods / Results / Conclusions.
Deputy Medical Director,
Chair of General Pediatrics
University Hospitals of Geneva
Klara Posfay-Barbe is Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva, Deputy Medical Director of the University Hospitals of Geneva, and Head of General Pediatrics in the Department of Women, Children and Adolescents. She is an active member of the Swiss Pediatric Infectious Diseases Group (PIGS), the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS), and the International Pediatric Transplant Association (IPTA).
Her main research interests are infections in immunocompromised patients (particularly pediatric transplant recipients), their responses to vaccines, the detection and management of viral and bacterial infections in this specific population, and host-pathogen interactions. She is also interested in the impact of infections on children's health in particular contexts, such as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Infectious Diseases
Stanford University School of Medicine Palo Alto, CA USA
Sharon F. Chen, MD MS is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Infectious Diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine, California USA. Dr. Chen is the Co-Director of Stanford Childrens’ Pediatric Infectious Diseases Program in Immunocompromised Hosts (PIDPIC). Dr. Chen’s research interest is in viral infections commonly affecting immunocompromised patients and the viruses' stimulation of the host's immune system. She has a special interest in latent and persistent viruses, such as cytomegalovirus, BK virus, adenovirus, hepatitis B virus and others. Dr. Chen focuses on the host immune response to these viruses with the end goal of improving clinical practices. She collaborates with individual and core viral/immunology laboratories to conduct my research, primarily on T-cell responses.
As Co-director of the Stanford Childrens' Pediatric Infectious Diseases Program in Immunocompromised Hosts (PIDPIC), Dr. Chen develops and conducts clinical and translational studies to improve identification, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in the immunocompromised patient population. In collaboration with the clinical teams, she establishes best practices from their clinical studies and starts innovative protocols, in order to improve care for their complex patient population.
Dr. Chen’s scholarly work extends to medical education. She has a special interest in how people think and make decisions. These are vital skills to continually improve in order to provide high-quality care to patients. "Thinking" is a hidden process, so Dr. Chen builds tools to expose these hidden traits and takes advantage of large language models and AI to help detect and analyze these traits. Using design thinking principles and rooted in education pedagogy, Dr. Chen builds assessment tools to promote continual learning. She collaborates with education experts in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).
09:40 | When and How to have Conversations about Sexual Health
Professor of Pediatrics The Ohio State University;
Medical Director, Infectious Diseases Host Defense Program Nationwide Children’s Hospital Columbus, Ohio, United States
Monica I. Ardura, DO, MSCS, FAAP, FPIDS, FIDSA is Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and pediatric infectious diseases (ID) consultant at Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH) in Columbus, Ohio, in the United States. As the Medical Director of the Host Defense Program at NCH her clinical and research interests focus on the epidemiology, prevention, and management of infections in immunocompromised children; she serves as the site investigator in multi-institutional studies evaluating ID diagnostic and best practice prevention strategies in this population. As the Program Director for the ID Host Defense Fellowship and the Associate Program Director for the general Pediatric ID Fellowship, she is a clinical educator committed to the education and training of fellows in the subspecialty of pediatric transplant and immunocompromised ID. Dr. Ardura is an active member of pediatric immunocompromised host societies including the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (PIDS), serving as past Chair of the Transplant Infectious Diseases Education Subcommittee and current Board Member, former Chair of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) ID Community of Practice Pediatrics Working Group, former Chair of the Infectious Diseases Committee of the International Pediatric Transplantation Association (IPTA), European Society of Paediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and AAP Committee on Infectious Diseases.
Senior Nurse Research Coordinator
Transplant Pregnancy Registry International (TPRI) Philadlphia, PA, USA
Lisa has dedicated her career to the field of transplantation in various roles and she has been with the Transplant Pregnancy Registry International (TPRI) for most of her career as the Senior Nurse Research Coordinator. Lisa is an active member of several transplant organizations and was recently elected as a Counselor-at-Large for the American Society of Transplantation. Lisa has authored numerous publications and has presented nationally and internally on the topics of contraception and pregnancy after transplantation.
11:00 | How to Achieve Pediatric Transplantation in Low Resource Settings
Head of Paediatric Nephrology and Solid Organ Transplantation
Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital
University of Cape Town
Full Professor & Head of Clinical Unit of Paediatric Nephrology and Solid Organ Transplantation at Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital. Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town. She is current Chair of IPNA 2025 Congress in Cape Town.
Her interests include Paediatric Nephrology and Care of Critically ill children specifically with AKI requiring all forms of Dialysis and Transplant in infants and children. She is on the Saving Young Lives (SYL) Steering Committee and enjoys training Fellows and outreach work in Africa developing paediatric renal and transplant programs.
She is also an amateur surfer :)
11:30 | Pursuing Academic Endeavors in Pediatric Transplantation: Writing Grants, Manuscripts, and Juggling Life’s Commitments
Professor of Child Health Psychology – Cardiology, Critical Care and Transplantation Institute of Cardiovascular Science, University College London London, UK
Senior Research Fellow Centre for Outcomes and Experience Research in Children’s Health, Illness and Disability Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London
Jo Wray MSc, PhD, DHP, C Psychol is a senior research fellow and health psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London, Professor of Child Health Psychology at the Institute of Cardiovascular Science, UCL and a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey. She has been an IPTA Councillor, member of several IPTA committees and was the recipient of the IPTA Distinguished Allied Health Professional award in 2013. She is currently an Associate Editor of Pediatric Transplantation.
She has worked in the field of paediatric cardiology and transplantation for over 30 years, both as a health psychology researcher and practitioner, establishing the first psychology clinical service and research programme in paediatric cardiothoracic transplantation at Harefield Hospital before moving to Great Ormond Street.
Professor of Pediatrics
Division Chief Pediatric Nephrology
EIC, Pediatric Transplantation University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Sharon Bartosh is Professor of Pediatrics and Division Chief of Pediatric Nephrology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. She has been Medical Director of Pediatric Kidney Transplantation for over 30 years. She has been on the Board of Directors of the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), the primary organ allocation system entity in the USA as well as a Councilor of the American Society of Transplantation. For the past 8 years she has been the North American Editor in Chief of Pediatric Transplantation, the official journal of the International Pediatric Transplant Association.
Professor of Paediatric Nephrology and Transplantation
Department of Paediatric Nephrology
University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health
Adult and Pediatric Nephrologist,
Department of Nephrology
Akron Children's Hospital and Akron General Medcial Center Cleveland Clinic
Rupesh Raina, M.D., associate professor of internal medicine, has been a clinical faculty member at NEOMED for seven years, and became M4 director in October 2021. He also practices adult and pediatric nephrology at Akron General Hospital, Summa Health and Akron Children’s Hospital, and conducts research on acute kidney injury and outcomes.
IPTA and TTS members will be automatically pre-registered for this Symposium, so no need to register separately. Please share the word about the VES with your colleagues!
Recordings will be available for IPTA and TTS members to view shortly after the VES.
To enable this Symposium to reach as wide an audience as possible, we would like to encourage all Trainees and Allied Health and Nursing Professionals to take this opportunity to join IPTA and receive one year’s free membership! You will be asked for one reference to prove your Trainee status. Please send this to membership@tts.org when submitting your application.
We would encourage new members to apply before Monday November 4 to enable your application to be processed ahead of the Symposium.
IPTA relies on donations from people like you to continue its invaluable activities in pediatric transplantation worldwide. Please donate to IPTA today!