Marc R. Laufer, MD Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology Harvard Medical School Boston, Massachusetts, USA 20th World Congress of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynaecology Keynote Presentation, May 19, 2023 Belgrade, Serbia
Marc R. Laufer, MD is Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He serves as Chief of Gynecology and Associate in Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, an Associate Obstetrician/Gynecologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and is on Active Medical Staff (Gynecology) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, all located in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Laufer completed an internship and a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, and fellowships in reproductive endocrinology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in pediatric/adolescent gynecology at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Laufer has developed an international reputation in the areas of adolescent endometriosis and congenital anomalies of the reproductive tract. He co-founded and is co-director of the Center for Young Women’s Health, which includes a website [www.youngwomenshealth.org] that receives millions of visits globally per month and is referred to as one of the best sites for health care information. In 2012, Dr. Laufer founded the Boston Center for Endometriosis (BCE) [www.bostoncenterendometriosis.org] for which he is the director of the multidisciplinary research collaboration striving to find new diagnostics, treatments, and a cure for endometriosis.
Lisa Allen, MD, FRCSC Dr. Allen obtained her MD from the University of Western Ontario. She completed a fellowship at the Women’s College Hospital, which was directed to developing surgical skills in pelvic floor surgery, laparoscopic urogynecologic surgery, and laser endometriosis surgery. Dr. Allen is the Head of the Section of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology at the Hospital for Sick Children and a Minimally Invasive Surgeon in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Women’s College Hospital and Sinai Health System. She is a Past President of the North American Society of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology as well as past Co-Chair of CANPAGO, the pediatric gynecology subspecialty committee of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She has completed the certificate program in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety and is the current Quality Lead of the Continuing Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Committee for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Toronto.
Paula J. Adams Hillard, M.D., is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine where she serves as Associate Chair for Medical Student Education. She earned a B.S. in Zoology from the University of North Carolina and obtained her M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in OB/Gyn at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was on the faculty at the University of Virginia, and served as Professor in the Departments of OB/Gyn and Pediatrics at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (CCHMC) /University of Cincinnati Medical Center for 23 years. At CCHMC she was the founder of a postgraduate fellowship training program in Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology. She currently directs the program in Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. She has been active on a number of national medical committees, including chair of the American College Obstetricians and Gynecologists' (ACOG) Committees on Patient Education, Adolescent Health, and Guidelines for Women’s Health; she is a past member of the Gynecologic Practice Committee, the Gynecology Document Review Committee, and the Ethics Committee. She was been an examiner for the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists from 1991-2015. She is a Board Member of the Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and was elected a fellow of the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society. She is a past president of the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, and is an active contributor to the literature in adolescent gynecology and contraception with over 200 journal articles and abstracts published. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology. She is the sole editor of two textbooks: the 5-Minute Consult in Obstetrics and Gynecology (2008) and Practical Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology (2013). She is the author of over 120 book chapters on women’s health. She has been a consultant and a member of tasks forces and committees for the CDC, the U.S. FDA, the NICHD, the AMA, American Cancer Society, and ACOG. In addition to her work as a member of editorial boards and as an ad hoc reviewer for professional publications, Dr. Hillard has extensive experience with the consumer press. She was a contributing editor to Parents magazine from 1982-1990, writing a monthly column on pregnancy and birth--and currently acts as an editorial consultant to women’s publications such as Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Glamour, YM, and Seventeen, as well as ABC News. She is a consultant to and a member of the medical advisory board of Clue, a menstrual cycle tracking app. She has been recognized for her teaching, and has been selected as one of 18 senior faculty master teachers/mentors for medical students at the Stanford University School of Medicine in a formal mentoring program called Educators for CARE: Compassion, Advocacy, Responsibility, and Empathy
Outstanding Achievement in Adolescent Health and Medicine
The Outstanding Achievement Award in Adolescent Medicine was established in 1981 to recognize individuals nationally and internationally for their commitment to improving the health and health care resources for adolescents and young adults.
I lead the work on Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRHR) in the World Health Organization’s Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research (which includes the UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Human Reproductive Programme). My work includes building the epidemiologic and evidence base on ASRHR and supporting countries to translate this data and evidence into action through well-conceived and well-managed policies and programmes.
I am originally from India, but have lived and worked outside the country since 1982. I completed my undergraduate medical training at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India in 1980, and my postgraduate training in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, England in 1989. I am now working to complete my doctorate at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
I joined WHO in April 1993 and worked on HIV prevention in WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS (till December 1995) and on supporting HIV country programmes in the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (till June 1996). From July 1996, my work has focussed on adolescent health in different departmental configurations in WHO. Before joining the organization, I worked for 12 years in Zambia (first in providing clinical services, then in preventing childhood malnutrition, and finally in preventing HIV and providing care and support to people living with HIV, in India (providing technical and financial support for HIV-related work at the early stage of the country’s response), and in Zimbabwe (setting up a regional training and mentoring initiative).
When I started working on adolescent health in the mid 1990s, the question being asked from the global to the national levels around the world was: Why do we need to address adolescents ? We responded by setting out the public health, economic and human rights arguments for this. By the start of the 2010s, there was growing recognition of the importance of addressing adolescents. The question being asked then was: What do we need to do to address adolescents ? We responded with syntheses of the available evidence of the effectiveness of interventions and intervention delivery mechanisms. Today, the question that is increasing being asked is: How do we do what needs to be done to address adolescents, in our social, cultural and economic context ? While continuing to make the case for action and to point to what works and what does not, our focus now is on learning from and with countries on what it takes to scale up the delivery of proven interventions at scale, with quality and equity, while involving adolescents meaningfully. Our documentation of ‘positive deviant’ countries, our implementation research and our technical assistance to countries addresses questions such as how to build support and overcome resistance to sexuality education, how to ensure that health workers know what they need to do if their patients are 16, not 6 or 26, and deliver services with empathy and without judgement, and how to meet the needs and fulfil the rights of those being left behind.
I am especially proud of the documentation work I have led over the last ten years which has contributed to changing the discourse on ASRHR from: ‘complicated, difficult to do, nearly impossible to show results in,’ to – the Obama era slogan – ‘Yes we can’. We have shown that rates of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing, HIV infections and HIV-related mortality, child marriage and female genital mutilation’ have been reduced even in countries with weak health and education systems, restrictive social norms and financial constraints.
Twenty-five years ago, when I joined WHO’s Adolescent Health Programme – which had been set up by Herbert Friedman and Jane Ferguson – only three other departments in WHO were working on adolescent health. Today, over 15 WHO departments are doing so. This increase in interest in adolescent health within WHO reflects what is happening within and outside the United Nations system, and more importantly in countries and communities around the world. It has been – and continues to be – a real privilege to work with individuals and organizations from around the world. I feel deeply grateful and rewarded at many levels.
Djuro Macut is Full Professor of Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at the Belgrade University Faculty of Medicine, Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated and completed clinical specialization in internal medicine and endocrinology as well as postgraduate studies in endocrinology at the same institution. Dr Macut was on clinical attachment programs at the University Hospitals in Bologna, Uppsala and Oxford, and completed postgraduate program in Reproductive Medicine from the University of Geneva and World Health Organization. Dr Macut is Head of Department of Endocrine Tumors and Hereditary Cancer Syndromes, and Deputy Director of the Clinic of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases, University Clinical Center of Serbia.
Dr Macut is Visiting Professor at the Athens University School of Medicine, Greece.
His research interests are related to reproductive endocrinology with special focus on polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and insulin resistance, as well to neuroendocrinology and neuroendocrine tumors.
He is the author or co-author of over 120 original papers published in peer-reviewed international journals, and the editor of two international monographs on PCOS and non-classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (NCAH) published by Karger and Frontiers.
He is as an Associate Editor of international journals Hormones and Endocrine.
Since 2016 is serving in different Committees of the European Society of Endocrinology (ESE). He was representative of the ESE Council of Affiliated Societies (ECAS) at the ESE Executive Committee (ex-officio, 2016-2020), and from 2020 is elected member of the ESE Executive Committee and ESE Treasurer. He was a member of the Program Organizing Committees of the 19th and 20th European Congress of Endocrinology (ECE) in Lisbon (2017) and Barcelona (2018).
Dr Macut is president of the Serbian Society for Reproductive Endocrinology, founder and organizer of the International Symposium on Advances in PCOS and Women’s Health since 2012, and Belgrade Masterclass in Clinical Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism since 2019.
Lih-Mei Liao PhD is a consultant clinical psychologist in the United Kingdom and an author of numerous peer-reviewed research articles on the psychosocial perspectives of reproductive and genital interventions. In the late 1990s, alongside medical experts, she co-developed a multi-disciplinary service for people impacted by intersex variations at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), where she was also the professional lead across Adult Clinical Health Psychology Services. Upon her retirement from UCLH in 2020, she has completed her book Variations in Sex Development: Medicine, Culture and Psychological Practice, due to be published by Cambridge University Press. This work follows on from two co-edited books Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery: Solution to What Problem and Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology: A Problem-Based Approach. Dr Liao was a cofounder of the European Network for Psychosocial Studies in Intersex/Diverse Sex Development, which was re-launched in 2020 as Psychosocial Studies in Intersex International (PSI-I, https://psiinternational.wixsite.com). She has served on the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Ethics Committee, the British Society for Paediatric & Adolescent Gynaecology committee and the Female Genital Mutilation National Clinical Group in the UK. She was a member of the editorial boards of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Psychology and Sexuality. She is a recipient of an achievement award from the Gay & Lesbian Medical Association and a fellow of the British Psychological Society.
