Passing the Baton: Isabelle Cleynen, SciCom Chair
At ECCO’26 in Stockholm, Isabelle Cleynen (Belgium) stepped down from the ECCO Scientific Committee. An associate professor at KU Leuven and leader of the Lab for Complex Genetics within the Department of Human Genetics, Isabelle joined SciCom in February 2022 and served as Chair for two years (February 2024–2026). She worked closely with the committee and the ECCO Office to support improvements to the Fellowships and Grants reviewer process and to galvanise ECCO’s reviewer community in response to an increasing number of funding applications.
Isabelle helped align SciCom’s Scientific Workshop procedures with those used for other ECCO papers, and oversaw the launch of the first ECCO Webinar with the first edition of the SciCom Basic Science webinar series. As we say thank you and farewell to Isabelle, we feel certain that her energy and collegiality over the past years will set a high standard for the next SciCom team.
In bidding goodbye to Isabelle, however, we are also happy to welcome the new Chair of SciCom, Tim Raine, and a new member of the committee, Giorgos Bamias.
Introducing the New SciCom Chair: Tim Raine (United Kingdom)
Tim Raine joined SciCom in February 2023 and now takes the reins as the new Chair as of February 2026. Tim is a consultant gastroenterologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK, where he leads the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) service. He has previously served as Chair of GuiCom. Tim takes up the leadership of SciCom at a very exciting time, as ECCO has just significantly increased the investment in scientific Research to EUR 2.5 million, with an additional Pioneer Award and now 15 ECCO Research Grants!
Introducing the New SciCom Member: Giorgos Bamias (Greece)
“I am a Professor of Gastroenterology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and the Director of the GI Unit of the 3rd Academic Department of Internal Medicine at Sotiria Hospital. Since the beginning of my career, my main clinical and research focus has been IBD. I worked for 5 years at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, United States, where I became familiar with animal models of intestinal inflammation and witnessed and participated in the great expansion of IBD-related immunological research that has taken over the last two decades.
My particular interest was the pathogenetic role of cytokines and effector lymphocytes in chronic intestinal inflammation and tissue damage, including the initial description and subsequent functional characterisation of TL1A:DR3 signalling in inflammatory pathways, which recently became a major therapeutic target for patients with IBD. In more recent years, my research has shifted from animal to human models, focusing on the function of intestinal myofibrοblasts and their contribution to inflammatory and fibrotic pathways in IBD. In addition, I have actively participated in translational and clinical studies in IBD.
I have recently served as the President of the Greek Society for the Study of IBD (EOMIFNE) and have co-ordinated national efforts to improve patient care and also multi-institutional clinical collaborative studies. I served for six years as a member of the CCFA Senior Research Awards Committee, which gave me experience in the critical assessment of current basic research in the field of IBD. I am thrilled to join SciCom and look forward to contributing to the exceptional work of ECCO, to disseminating basic and translational research and to helping to address the current and future challenges facing our patients with IBD.”
