New Committee Members in P-ECCO

Richard Hansen is a Consultant Paediatric Gastroenterologist at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Glasgow. He holds a PhD in gut microbiology and wrote the first paper in the literature on the microbiome of treatment-naïve paediatric IBD at presentation. He is a principal investigator within the Bacteria, Immunology, Gastroenterology and ‘Omics (BINGO) group at the University, which developed the CD-TREAT diet for Crohn’s Disease. His main research interest is the gastrointestinal mucosal microbiota and its importance in paediatric disease, particularly IBD. He is especially interested in the molecular characterisation of the microbiota and its subsequent modification for the purposes of therapeutic effect via microbial therapeutics. He is a strong advocate for patients and was honorary medical director for the UK-based charity Crohn’s in Childhood Research Association from 2017 to 2020. Finally, Richard Hansen was paediatric and adolescent representative on the 2019 BSG IBD guidelines and has contributed to the work of the BSG IBD COVID group since then, including leading guidance on how to approach the management of Acute Severe Colitis in children during the pandemic. Richard has been an ECCO Member since 2014. He hopes to develop paediatric IBD-specific online teaching packs during his time on the P-ECCO Committee, covering the core elements of paediatric practice, including diagnosis, phenotyping and the assessment of disease activity.

Dror Shouval is Director of the IBD Center at the Institute of Gastroenterology, Nutrition and Liver Diseases at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, and the PI of the Mucosal Immunology Lab at the hospital. After a paediatric residency in Israel, he moved to the United States, where he completed a Paediatric Gastroenterology Fellowship and an Advanced IBD Fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and a Master’s Degree in Clinical and Translational Investigation at Harvard Medical School. During his time in Boston, he performed extensive research in Scott Snapper’s lab studying the role of IL10 regulation of intestinal immune responses in the gut, trying to understand why patients with deleterious mutations in the IL10 axis develop a severe medical-refractory form of IBD in the first months of life. His current research focuses on identifying new monogenic disorders associated with IBD and novel mechanisms of mucosal homeostasis and their breakdown in IBD. He has been a member of ECCO since 2015, has presented various studies at ECCO Congresses over the years and has also been a member of the Porto IBD Group of ESPGHAN since 2019. As a new member of P-ECCO, Dror wishes to expand the involvement of paediatric IBD specialists in ECCO Activities and to develop new educational platforms that will benefit physicians and other health care professionals who are part of ECCO.

Please allow me to sincerely thank David Wilson, our former chair, and Marina Aloi for their devotion to our committee. Both will be hugely missed! We wish you both all the best and look forward to continuing our collaboration beyond the committee tasks.