Endocrine Abstracts

W Wiersinga, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract

Wilmar M Wiersinga obtained his MD in Amsterdam in 1969 and his Board Certification in Internal Medicine in 1976. He obtained his PhD cum laude in 1979 at the University of Amsterdam on the thesis ‘The peripheral conversion of T4 into T3 and reverse T3’. Thereafter he spent two years as a research fellow at the UCLA with professors David Solomon and Inder Chopra. Returning to the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, he was appointed as Full Professor of Endocrinology at the University of Amsterdam in 1991. He has been Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine in the Academic Medical Center from 1996–2007.

His research has focussed on the thyroid, encompassing basic, translational and clinical studies. Main topics have been the sick euthyroid syndrome, thyroid hormone receptors, amiodarone, autoimmune thyroid disease, and Graves’ ophthalmopathy. He organized several international thyroid symposia in Amsterdam with the Amsterdam Thyroid Club, and founded the European Group on Graves’ Orbitopathy (EUGOGO) in 1999. He supervised 22 doctoral theses of PhD students, and published 344 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

He has been member of the Executive Board of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Dutch Medical Research Council) from 1989–1995, president of the Dutch Endocrine Society from 1989–1994, Continental Editor of Clinical Endocrinology from 1994–2001, member of the Executive Committe of the European Federation of Endocrine Societies from 1998–2003, chairman of the Board of Research institutes of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Amsterdam from 2001–2006, president of the European Thyroid Association from 2003–2006, and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism since 2005. He chaired the local organizing committees of the 3rd Congress of the European Federation of Endocrine Societies in 1994 and of the 23rd annual meeting of the European Thyroid Association in 1996, both in Amsterdam. He has been member of numerous programme organizing committees of international meetings. Presently he is member of the Annual Meeting Steering Committe of the Endocrine Society in the USA, and chair of the POC of the International Thyroid Conference in Paris in 2010.