Editorial introductions

Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care was launched in 1998. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The fields of clinical nutrition and metabolic care are divided into 13 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce the Section Editors for this issue.

Section Editors

Vickie E. Baracos

Figure 1

Dr Baracos completed her PhD in Applied Biochemistry and Nutrition at the University of Nottingham, England, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. Dr Baracos's subsequent career at the University of Alberta, Canada, spans two decades and has been devoted to studies of the balance of anabolic and catabolic factors in different physiological and pathological states. Most recently, the main focus of Dr Baracos's interest in hypercatabolic states has been malignant disease. Dr Baracos is currently the Alberta Cancer Foundation Chair in Palliative Medicine, and a Professor in the Department of Oncology. She is leader of a national research program on cancer: associated cachexia in Canada; and represents nutrition research in the National Cancer Institute of Canada Clinical Trials group.

Jean-Paul Thissen

Figure 2

Dr Jean-Paul Thissen is Professor of Medicine in the division of Endocrinology and Nutrition at the Catholic University of Louvain (Brussels, Belgium). He obtained his MD degree in 1983 and completed his residency at the same university. During his post-doctoral training, he spent three years working in the laboratory of Louis E. Underwood at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The major focus of Dr Thissen's laboratory is to investigate the mechanisms of regulation of growth factors, in particular the insulin-like growth factors, production, and action by nutrients and cytokines. Major emphasis is now directed at determining the role of IGF-I in the molecular mechanisms responsible for muscle atrophy in catabolic situations. His work is funded by the National Belgian Scientific Foundation. Dr Thissen has published 70 articles, reviews and book chapters. He is also a member of several scientific and professional societies in endocrinology and nutrition.

Gil Hardy

Figure 3

Gil Hardy trained as a Biochemist, with degrees from Bristol and Cambridge Universities, England. He subsequently worked in Belgium and Germany, and then began post-doctoral research in the Metabolic Research Laboratory of Nobel Prize Winner, the late Professor Sir Hans Krebs in Oxford. In 1998 Dr Hardy was appointed Professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Oxford Brookes University where he expanded his research interests and helped develop new courses in Clinical Nutrition. He is currently Professor of Pharmaceutical Nutrition in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland, conducting collaborative formulation and metabolic research into specialised nutraceuticals with colleagues in the UK, Australasia and South America.

Professor Hardy has served on the Council of the UK Nutrition Society and is a founding member of its Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism Group. He is past Chairman of the British Pharmaceutical Nutrition Group, which in 2002 established the annual 'Allwood-Hardy' lecture jointly in his honour. He is a recently elected Council member of the Australasian Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (AuSPEN) and also serves on the Research Committee of the American Society (ASPEN). An active member of ASPEN, AuSPEN, ESPEN and SBPNE, he has lectured on nutraceuticals and pharmaceutical issues of Nutrition Support at many of their annual Congresses.

He is Editor of the Australasian edition of Complete Nutrition, is a Section Editor for Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care, Associate Editor of Current Research in Nutraceuticals and edits the Nutraceuticals column for the international journal Nutrition.

In all, Professor Hardy has presented approximately 160 papers, posters and educational lectures in the fields of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Nutrition. He is recognised as a world authority on the pharmaceutical and metabolic properties of Glutamine and is the founder and organiser of the internationally acclaimed Oxford Glutamine Workshops. Together with other PN enthusiasts, he represents IPANEMA (International Parenteral Nutrition Education and Methodology Advancement): a charitable trust which sponsors satellite symposia at major scientific meetings around the world.

Antonio C. Campos

Figure 4

Antonio Carlos Campos was born in 1957 in Curitiba, Brazil. He graduated at the Medical School of the Federal University of Parana in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1980. After finishing his Residency in General Surgery, he spent a year in Montpellier, France, with Professor Henri Joyeux. During this period his interest for Clinical nutrition was stimulated through his participation in several clinical and experimental investigations, largely focusing on parenteral nutrition. In particular, he worked with the influence of parenteral lipid emulsions on liver regeneration after partial hepatectomy in dogs. Upon returning to Brazil, he obtained a Master's Degree in Clinical Surgery in 1987, working with dogs subjected to total colectomy and ileal reservoirs. At the end of 1987 he went to Syracuse, New York, as a Research Fellow at the State University of New York, under the guidance of Professor Michael Meguid. This was a very productive period. Dr Campos participated in a number of clinical and experimental investigations covering a wide range of subjects in nutrition, including cancer, control of food intake and perioperative nutrition. After returning to Brazil, he was accepted in a PhD program in Clinical Surgery, and his PhD degree was obtained in 1992, working with bacterial translocation in rats receiving parenteral nutrition.

In 1996 Dr Campos became Professor of Surgery at the Federal University of Parana. Presently, he is the Director of the Graduate Program in Clinical Surgery at the same university. During his entire career, he has devoted a substantial amount of work to nutrition. He has over 130 papers published in National and International Journals, mostly on nutrition and surgery. Dr Campos has over 400 participations in Congresses as speaker. He was President of the Brazilian Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition from 1997 to 1999 and President of the Latin American Federation of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (FELANPE) from 1999 to 2001. Dr Campos is a Section Editor of the journal Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care and has been the Latin American Editor of Nutrition since 1994.

Berthold V. Koletzko

Figure 5

Berthold V. Koletzko, M.D., is Professor of Paediatrics and Head of the Division of Metabolic Diseases and Nutritional Medicine at the Hauner Children's Hospital, University of Munich, Germany. Following work at paediatric departments in South Africa and in Tanzania, he qualified in paediatrics at the Children's Hospital, University of Düsseldorf, Germany and completed a fellowship in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism at the Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Canada.

His research focuses on metabolism and nutrition in childhood, pregnancy and lactation; metabolic diseases; and clinical nutrition. He has co-authored more than 550 publications and received numerous awards and honors. He serves as coordinator of the EU Research Programme on early nutrition programming of adult health (www.metabolic-programming.org) and of the ESPGHAN-ESPEN guidelines on pediatric parenteral nutrition. He is also currently the Chair of the ESPGHAN Committee on Nutrition (www.espghan.org) and Vice-President of the German Society for Clinical Nutrition (www.dgem.de).

Raanan Shamir

Figure 6

Raanan Shamir is currently the Director of the Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition Unit at the Meyer Children's Hospital of Haifa, Rambam Medical Center, and is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport School of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Raanan Shamir received his MD degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, and was trained in Pediatrics at the Beilinson Medical Center, in Petach-Tiqva, Israel. In the early 1990s, he was a fellow at the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and came back to Israel to be the Head of the Department of Nutrition at the Israel Ministry of Health.

His current research areas include exploring the effects of oral insulin supplementation on the intestine, pediatric nutrition and childhood hyperlipidemia, celiac disease and examining the role of paraoxonases in the intestine. Current committee appointments include being the Chairman of the Nutrition Committee of the Israel Pediatric Association, Chairman of the Israel society for Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, and a member of the Committee on Nutrition, European Society of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN).