Thursday, October 13 – 08:00 AM CDT

Jerzy Olszewsky Invited Lecture
Dr. Roland Auer, MD PhD

Dr. Auer’s Neuropathology training in London (see photo) was bookended by a previous MD from the University of Alberta and a subsequent PhD in brain damage from the University of Lund, Sweden. From 1985-2010 he ran a brain damage research laboratory focusing on hypoglycemia, ischemia, epilepsy, trauma and neurotoxicology. In 2013, he received his first case of alleged child abuse and for almost a decade has been returning to anatomical pathology roots in elucidating cause of death. In squash tournaments over the years, Dr. Auer has dropped in the category he has entered from B to C and now D, but he recently withdrew from a very minor sprain and he tells us he might break something if he plays tournaments now. He enjoys writing, most recently obituaries, beginning with that of Dr. John Kaufmann, then Stirling Carpenter and now John Plunkett. The three obituaries have artificially inflated Dr. Auer’s peer-reviewed publications to 132, cited over 12½ thousand times, obituaries included. Roland’s secret loves are physics and pathophysiology, not neuropathology, and he wants the audience to keep this a secret.

Friday, October 14 – 13:00 PM CDT

Invited Lecture
Brent Thoma, MD, MSc, FRCPC, MA, DRCPSC

Dr. Brent Thoma is a Professor at the University of Saskatchewan where he works as an emergency physician, trauma team leader, and medical education researcher. He is also a Clinician Educator involved with the implementation of Competence By Design at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

Friday, October 14 – 13:45 PM CDT

Invited Lecture
Dr. Marcio Gomes

Dr. Marcio Gomes is an Associate Professor of Pathology and Distinguished Teacher at the University of Ottawa. He obtained his medical degree in 1995, completed his residency training in 1999 and obtained his PhD in 2003, all at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He moved to Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 2005, where he worked as an Assistant Professor until 2008. He has two main academic interests: thoracic pathology and medical education.

Dr. Gomes has developed many educational innovations and received several teaching and education awards, including the 2010 Award of Excellence and Innovation in Postgraduate Medical Education by the University of Ottawa, the 2014 Professional Association of Residents of Ontario (PARO) Clinical Teaching Award, and the Leadership in Education Award of the Canadian Association of Pathologists (CAP-ACP) in 2017. He completed his Masters in Health Professions Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020 supported by the RCPSC Robert Maudsley Fellowship for Studies in Medical Education.

Dr. Gomes is a clinician educator in the Specialties Unit of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada since 2017, where he works with the development of new Areas of Focused Competence and the implementation of Competency-byDesign. He is also the Regional Advisor for Latin America with Royal College International and participates in many international partnerships for the development of residency education. His main areas of interest in education are competency-based medical education, educational design, workplace-based instruction and assessment, continuing professional development, and interprofessional education.

Friday, October 14 – 14:30 PM CDT

Invited Lecture
Dr. Patrick Shannon, MD

Dr. Shannon is a graduate of McGill University and the University of Toronto. Upon completion of his medical degree, he trained in Toronto where he completed fellowships in Neuropathology and Anatomical Pathology.

Since 2005 he has worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, as a Perinatal Pathologist and is currently the Medical Director of the autopsy and perinatal service there as well as an Associate Professor in LMP at the University of Toronto.

He is currently serving as Chair of the Specialty Committee for Neuropathology for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons and was the Residency Program Director for Neuropathology at the University of Toronto.

Saturday, October 15 – 08:00 AM CDT

Gordon Mathieson Invited Lecture
Dr. G.R. Wayne Moore, BSc, MD, CM, FRCPC, FRCPath

Wayne Moore, BSc, MD, CM, FRCPC, FRCPath is Clinical Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (Neuropathology) at the University of British Columbia and is a Principal Investigator at the International Collaboration for Repair Discoveries (ICORD). He is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and in the Division of BioMedical Sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He received his BSc degree from Memorial University of Newfoundland and his MD, CM degree from McGill University. He did his Neurology residency at the Mayo Clinic and his Neuropathology residency at Queen’s University and is certified in both specialties.

His post-doctoral fellowship was in experimental neuropathology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he subsequently was on faculty in the Departments of Pathology and Neurology for several years before moving to Vancouver.

His current research interests are the neuropathology and pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis and their relationship to magnetic resonance imaging.

Saturday, October 15 – 08:50 AM CDT

David Robertson Invited Lecture
Dr. Michael Levin, MD

Dr. Michael Levin is the Saskatchewan MS Clinical Research Chair and Professor of Neurology and Anatomy, Physiology & Pharmacology at the University of Saskatchewan. He received his BS in Chemistry at George Washington University, his MD at Pennsylvania State University and neuroscience training at The Salk Institute. Dr. Levin completed his residency training in Neurology at the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center – Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where Drs. Fred Plum and Jerry Posner mentored him including while he was chief neurology resident. He then completed his MS post-doctoral fellowship at NIH.

He was recruited to the University of Tennessee where he moved up the ranks to professor with tenure, was Chief of the Neurology Service at the Memphis Veterans Affairs Medical Center and led the MS clinic and developed a translational research program based on the role that dysfunctional RNA binding proteins play in the pathogenesis of MS. His work has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, Annals of Neurology, and Journal of Neuroscience Research. Dr. Levin has received more than 30 awards for academic excellence including a Canadian ‘Science, Technology, Innovation and Collaboration’ Award for the discovery of stress granules in the brains of MS patients and a Tri-agency New Frontiers Research Grant – one of the most competitive in Canada.

Dr. Levin is married to his lovely wife of more than 30 years, Dr. Audrey Zucker-Levin, and has two strappingly handsome sons and is an avid sailor and scuba diver.

Saturday, October 15 – 10:00 AM CDT

Invited Lecture
Dr. E. Ann Yeh, MD

Dr. E. Ann Yeh is currently Professor of Paediatrics (Neurology) at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, where she is the director of the MS and Neuroinflammatory Disorders Program at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and Senior Scientist in the Division of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute. She is former Program Director of the Child Neurology Training Program at the University of Toronto, and currently heads the Fellowship training program in Neuroinflammatory Disorders at the Hospital for Sick Children. She leads multiple multisite, multi-investigator studies focused on lifestyle factors and visual and other outcomes in youth with neuroinflammatory disorders and has authored over 175 publications related to these subjects. She co-leads the Interventional Clinical Trials Infrastructure team at the Hospital for Sick Children. She is a member of the multiple editorial boards, including Neurology and Multiple Sclerosis Journal and is a Chief Editor of Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.

Saturday, October 15 – 10:50 PM CDT

Invited Lecture
Dr. Tanja Kuhlmann, MD PhD

Dr. Tanja Kuhlmann studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, Germany where she received her medical degree in 1998.She specialized in neuropathology and worked as medical resident and research fellow in different neuropathological departments in Germany and at McGill, Canada in the research groups of Dr. Jack Antel and Dr. Alan Peterson. In 2008, she became senior consultant and associate professor, Institute of Neuropatholohgy at the University Hospital Münster, Germany and in 2020 part-time adjunct professor, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University. Her key research interests are mechanisms leading to axonal and oligodendroglial pathology in demyelinating diseases. In recent years, she focused her research on iPSC technology and the derivation of human CNS cells from iPSC to study disease mechanisms. She has published several publications in well-known international journals on the topic of MS pathology, especially on oligodendroglial loss and remyelination as well as studies using iPSC-derived oligodendrocytes and neurons to understand disease mechanisms in demyelinating and neurodegenerative diseases.

Saturday, October 15 – 11:40 AM CDT

Invited Lecture
Pamela Kanellis

Pamela is Assistant Vice-President, Research and the research lead at the MS Society of Canada. Throughout her career, she has focused on the health and life sciences sector, working closely with researchers, innovators and crosssector stakeholders in academia, government and industry to accelerate research and innovation.

Pamela was formerly a Senior Director, Research & Global Academy at CIFAR working to cultivate interdisciplinary research networks to address questions of global importance. As the lead of the Global Academy at CIFAR, she rapidly grew the visibility and reach of a new program for early career researchers from all over the world to develop the next generation of research leaders. Prior to this role, Pamela was a Program Officer at Grand Challenges Canada where she pioneered and led the non-communicable disease portfolio focused on improving mental health in developing countries, working closely with global partners at the WHO, NIH and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Pamela started her career at a strategy health and life sciences consulting firm working in research and innovation with clients from academia, biopharmaceutical industry, government and not-for-profits in Canada and abroad. Pamela received a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Toronto in the area of DNA repair and genome stability and an honours BSc. in biochemistry from McMaster University.