The UAB to award Ingrid E. Lundberg an honarary doctorate

Ingrid E. Lundberg studied medicine and received her PhD from the Karolinska Institute, and furthered her training in the United States, specifically at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and at Harvard Medical School. Her studies have focused on myositis or inflammatory myopathies. Her contributions include the genetic study of these diseases and the international effort to establish homogeneous and useful classification criteria: establishing a European registry with more than 5,000 patients affected by these diseases has helped to acquire a better understanding of their complications and to classify this group of systemic autoimmune diseases. She is head of the European Myositis Network (EUMYONET) at the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR). She has supervised more than thirty doctoral theses and was the organiser of the first multimedia conference for the study of myositis, which takes place regularly every two years.

Regarding her collaborations with the UAB, she has worked with the Department of Medicine in the study of inflammatory muscle pathology related to anti-synthetase antibodies and their manifestations in the pericardium, as well as their relationship with occupational exposure and response to treatment with immunosuppressants such as calcineurin inhibitors. Thanks to this joint work, UAB researchers have been able to carry out stays at Karolinska Institutet and joint papers have been published between the UAB Department of Medicine and Karolinska since the collaboration began in 2004. All this joint research contributes to improving the molecular, immunological and clinical characterisation of inflammatory myopathies.