Introduction of the new ECCO Associate Editors

Nuha Yassin (MBChB, MSc, PhD, FRCS) is a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospital, West Midlands, United Kingdom. She has clinical and research interests in IBD and has been an active member of ECCO for several years and has recently finished her term as the Y-ECCO Committee Chair. Furthermore, Nuha trained in several regions in the United Kingdom and spent a few years at St Mark’s Hospital, Harrow, London where she obtained her PhD from St Mark’s and Imperial College London. Her PhD was in the area of perianal Crohn’s fistulae and she used various laboratory, clinical and qualitative research methodologies, thus painting the anal fistula story from laboratory to bedside. In addition, she secured the Royal College of Surgeons of England Research Fellowship. She has won several awards, amongst which are the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland travelling fellowship where she visited the IBD and surgical units of AMC, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; as well as securing the Richard Cobb West Midlands travelling fellowship where she visited the colorectal surgical unit at Humanitas Hospital, Milan, Italy. She has also secured the European Society of Coloproctology Short travelling fellowship where she will be visiting the Coloproctology and Surgical Innovation Centre in London, Ontario, Canada. 

Ignacio Catalán-Serra (MD, PhD) is currently working as Gastroenterology Senior Consultant at Levanger Hospital, as well as a researcher at the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research Group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the Centre of Molecular Inflammation Research in Trondheim, Norway. After training as a fellow in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Hospital Arnau de Vilanova, he worked as coordinator of the IBD Unit and as associate professor at the University of Valencia, Spain, where he got his PhD for his studies on Innate Immunity and Crohn´s Disease. He completed his clinical IBD training at Mt. Sinai Hospital IBD Unit (New York, USA) and has continued his clinical and research interest in IBD, with special focus on the pathogenesis of the disease, the role of the innate immunity and opportunistic infections, as well as clinical studies.