Organisation

Scientific Committee Committee German-Speaking Countries Committee Swiss Programme Committee PHPCI Academy Committee City Programme Local Organizing Committee Volunteers / Helfer:innen

Committee PHPCI Academy

Joachim Cohen

Prof Joachim Cohen is a social health scientist and a professor of the End-of-Life Care Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In the research group he is chairing a research program on public health and palliative care. He graduated in 2001 as a Master in Sociology and in 2007 as a PhD in Social Health Sciences. His research has been awarded with the Kubler Ross Award for Young Researchers and the Young Investigator Award from the European Association of Palliative Care 2010. Both prizes were awarded to him, mainly because of his large-scale population-based and population-level cross-national research on end-of-life care. Prof. Cohen has published over 220 articles in international peer reviewed journals and co-edited the Oxford University Press book: “A public health perspective on end of life care”. He has 5870 citations in Web of Science and a h-index of 41.

Luc Deliens

Luc Deliens, medical sociologist, is Research Professor of Palliative Care and Founding Director of the multidisciplinary End-of-Life Care Research Group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Ghent University. Internationally, he is President of PHPCI, and co-chairs the EAPC Reference Group on Public Health & Palliative Care. He has a wide range of research interests in palliative care and end-of-life decisions, incl. assisted dying. In 2022, he organised with his team the 7^th PHPCI conference in Bruges, Belgium. Furthermore, he is Associate Editor of Palliative Care & Social Practice and is involved in a large number of international Horizon Europe projects. He published over 600 papers in peer-reviewed journals and over 50 book chapters, and successfully supervised 60 PhDs in palliative care or end-of-life decision-making. He is member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium.

Steffen Eychmüller

Steffen Eychmüller is a palliative care physician since more than 20 years. Specialized in Internal medicine, psychosomatics and psychotherapy he learned from several stays in Australia how to run a regional palliative care as well as an academic center in this field. He led the Center for Palliative Care at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen from 1999 to 2011 and built up the University Center for Palliative Care at the University Hospital of Bern, Switzerland from 2012, taking over the first professorship for palliative medicine at the University of Bern in 2016. Inspired from a collaboration with Kerala, India, he started to co-create compassionate communities in 2008 in the Eastern part of Switzerland, followed by the compassionate city of Bern, the Swiss capital, in 2020.

Valentina González Jaramillo

Valentina González-Jaramillo is a physician and epidemiologist. After obtaining her MD, she did a one-year program in Clinical Research at Harvard Medicinal School and obtained her master degree in Clinical Epidemiology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Then, she completed her PhD at the University of Bern and is currently a researcher at the University Hospital Inselspital. She is passionate about improving the quality of life for patients with heart failure. In addition, she has a broad interest in improving access to palliative care. For this reason, in recent years, she has also been dedicated to studying a public health strategy in palliative care: compassionate communities/cities.

Guy Peryer

Dr Guy Peryer is a chartered psychologist and a chartered scientist. He studied the psychology of music for his master’s degree and went on to complete a PhD in applied psychology and complex systems. Guy was awarded an advanced fellowship by the National Institute for Health and Care Research in the UK to support death literacy knowledge mobilisation across non-clinical community networks in the East of England. His fellowship works with one of NHS England’s ambition statements to improve palliative and end-of-life care: Each Community is Prepared to Help.

Libby Sallnow

Dr Libby Sallnow is a palliative medicine physician at CNWL NHS Trust in London and an academic at St Christopher's Hospice, UCL Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. She has led and developed the fields of new public health approaches to end of life care, compassionate communities and social approaches to death, dying and loss over the past two decades. She is an Honorary Consultant at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Palliative Care in Kerala, India, and the first author of the new Lancet Commission on the Value of death: bringing death back into life (2022).

Carol Tishelman

Carol Tishelman was born, bred and educated as a Registered Nurse in the US, but has lived in Sweden for most of her life. She has a unique Professorship in Innovative Care at Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm Health Care Services, conducting research at the juncture of health and social care. Carol initiated and led the transdisciplinary DöBra research program in Sweden for over a decade, integrating palliative care, public health and health promotion. DöBra was awarded Karolinska Institutet’s cultural prize in 2021, for integrating science and culture in research, and close collaboration with community stakeholders. She has over 200 publications, most in international peer-reviewed journals. Carol is one of few RN elected members of Academia Europea, was previously an EAPC board member, and has been active in a variety of EU-funded and international projects in cancer, palliative and EoL care.