20th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology

20th World Congress of Basic  
 and Clinical Pharmacology 2026  
  #WCP2026

Plenary and Keynote Speakers

More speakers will be announced over the coming weeks.

Professor Biykem Bozkurt

Professor Biykem Bozkurt
Ph.D., FHFSA, FAHA, FACC, FESC, FACP

Prof Biykem Bozkurt is the Senior Dean of Faculty, the Mary and Gordon Cain Chair and Professor of Medicine; Director of Winters Center of Heart Failure; Associate Director of Cardiovascular Research Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, and the Medicine Chief at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medicine in Houston TX.

Throughout her career, Prof Bozkurt has been recognized for excellence in clinical care, education, and research. She was the recipient of the VA career development grant and MERIT research awards, American College of Cardiology Proctor Harvey MD Young Teacher Award, American College of Cardiology Gifted Educator Award, Baylor College of Medicine presidential awards in Education, Lifetime Master Clinician, and Professionalism. She has been listed in Clarivate World’s Highly Cited Researchers (top 1% Web of Science) in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2023.

Prof Bozkurt is the Editor-in-Chief of JACC: Heart Failure. She served as the President of the Heart Failure Society of America in 2019-2020, led the Universal Definition and Classification of Heart Failure as the Chair in 2021, and is the Vice-Chair of the 2022 AHA/ACC Heart Failure Guidelines Writing Committee. She served as a Senior Associate Editor for Circulation; heart failure section editor for the Journal of American College of Cardiology. Prof Bozkurt actively participates in clinical and translational research; provides advanced heart failure patient care; presents at national and international scientific sessions; teaches and mentors trainees and faculty.

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Professor Meiyu Geng

Professor Meiyu Geng
Ph.D

Meiyu Geng received her Ph.D. degree from Tokyo University, Japan. She is currently a professor and principal investigator at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr Geng’s research interest is to discover new targeted anticancer therapies. She has played a leading role in the discovery and development of more than ten targeted cancer therapies, particularly small-molecule inhibitors targeting receptor tyrosine kinases and epigenetic modulators, with two having been approved for market in China or overseas. She is the co-inventor of more than 120 domestic or international patents. In parallel to drug discovery, her team is interested to implement precision medicine in drug discovery, particularly to discover molecular biomarkers that inform patient stratification, response assessment and drug resistance management. As the corresponding author, Dr Geng has published over 170 research articles in peer-reviewed journals including Cell, Cancer Cell, etc. Dr Geng has received a number of prestigious national awards, such as China Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award, Prize of Scientific and Technological Progress of Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation, Wu Jieping-Paul Janssen Medical & Pharmaceutical Award, 1st Award of Shanghai Outstanding Talents, etc.

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Professor Tracy Handel

Professor Tracy Handel

Prof Tracy Handel obtained her PhD in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, conducted postdoctoral studies at Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals, began her academic career at the University of California Berkeley where she obtained tenure. She is a Distinguished Professor and former Division Chair in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of San Diego.

She is internationally recognized as an expert in chemokine structure and function, including interactions of chemokines with chemokine receptors, chemokine receptor/effector complexes and glycosaminoglycans, and the mechanisms of atypical scavenging and dual function chemokine receptors that have both G protein-dependent signaling and G protein-independent scavenging functions. More recently she has pursued more translational research directions to exploit the chemokine system for improved immunotherapy.

She is on the Scientific Advisory Board of several companies and has received several awards including the National Science Young Investigator Award, the Pew Scholars Award and most recently was elected Fellow of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

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Professor Sharon Lewin

Professor Sharon Lewin AO

Professor Sharon Lewin is the Director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital; Director of the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics; and Melbourne Laureate Professor at The University of Melbourne.

Sharon is an infectious diseases physician and basic scientist. Her research focuses on understanding why HIV persists on treatment and developing clinical trials aimed at ultimately finding a cure for HIV infection. Sharon is recognised as a leading global expert in HIV science. She has received numerous awards, including being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in recognition of her distinguished service to medical research, and to education and clinical care, in the field of infectious diseases, particularly HIV and AIDS.

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Professor Jesse Swen

Professor Jesse Swen
Pharm.D., Ph.D.

Jesse Swen PharmD, PhD is a full professor of clinical pharmacy, in particular translational pharmacogenetics. He works as a clinical pharmacist-clinical pharmacologist at the Department of Clinical Pharmacy & Toxicology, Leiden University Medical Center where he is the chair of the laboratory of the hospital pharmacy. 

The long-term central goal of his career is to improve the outcomes of drug treatment by gaining a better understanding of the genetic mechanisms that result in inter-individual variability in drug response. Jesse is working on the following research topics:

  • Dissecting the impact of rare, structural and regulatory variants on drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME)
  • Elucidating the mismatch between the drug metabolizer genotype and the capacity of an individual to metabolize drugs (phenoconversion).
  • Translating pharmacogenomics to patient care.

This work is seamlessly integrated with his work as chair of the pharmacy laboratory. He has (co-) authored more than 200 (Web of Science indexed) articles in international peer reviewed scientific journals and several chapters in books. He is one of the primary investigators of the “Ubiquitous Pharmacogenomics” project (www.upgx.eu) and leader of the PREPARE trial that assessed the clinical utility of pharmacogenetics panel testing across 7 European sites. In addition, he is an active member of the Dutch Pharmacogenetics Working Group (DPWG) and the US Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC).  

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Professor Simon Maxwell

Professor Simon Maxwell

Simon Maxwell is Professor of Student Learning/Clinical Pharmacology and Prescribing at the University of Edinburgh, where he has led in developing e-Learning strategies to support education in this area. He is also the Director of the University’s Masters in Internal Medicine programme. His clinical responsibilities include supervision of acute medical admissions and the management of outpatients at increased cardiovascular risk. He was formerly Vice-President of the British Pharmacological Society (BPS) and is a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians in London and Edinburgh and of the Higher Education Academy. He led the development of and is Medical Director of the Prescribing Safety Assessment, a joint initiative by the BPS and Medical Schools Council delivering a national assessment of prescribing for all UK medical students. This process has now been adopted in several other countries. He is co-lead for the Pharmacology Education Project (PEP), an IUPHAR initiative to provide freely accessible learning materials for students of the pharmacological sciences in resource-poor countries.

BPS lecture sponsored by

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Professor Csaba Szabo

Professor Csaba Szabo
M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.B.P.S.

Professor Szabo is a globally recognised expert in oxidative and nitrosative stress, gaseous transmitters, cell dysfunction, and inflammatory mechanisms. He pioneered the concept of identifying the nuclear enzyme PARP's role in promoting cell necrosis, contributing to critical illnesses and cardiovascular diseases. In the last decade, Szabo focused on hydrogen sulfide, discovering its roles in shock, angiogenesis, cancer, and Down syndrome, leading to new therapeutic concepts. His recent work has also explored cyanide's biological roles in mammals.

Trained as an M.D./Ph.D. in Budapest, Szabo worked as a postdoc with Nobel Laureate Sir John Vane in London. He then led multiple research groups across the USA in both academia and industry, and now chairs the Pharmacology Section and the Department of Oncology, Microbiology, and Immunology at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). His work has led to clinical-stage drugs, significant transactions, the pioneering of novel pathophysiological and pharmacological concepts and tools. He is recognised as one of the world's most cited pharmacologists with a H-index of 150. He has received numerous prestigious awards and serves on a number of editorial boards.

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