Keynote Speakers

• Virginia Braun
  Professor, Faculty of Science, Psychology
  University of Auckland, New Zealand
  
  

• Yvonne Wengström
  Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
  
  

• Helena Leino-Kilpi
  Professor, Department of Nursing Science
  University of Turku, Finland
  
  

• Walter Sermeus
  Professor, KU Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy Leuven, Belgium

Virginia ''Ginny'' Braun

Professor
School of Psychology at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland.

A feminist and critical health psychologist, Ginny teaches, researches and supervises students researching gender, sex and sexuality and health related topics.

However, Ginny is most known for the development of an approach to thematic analysis (with AP Victoria Clarke), and for qualitative methodological writing more broadly.

Award winning books with Victoria Clarke are Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners (Sage, 2013) and Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide (Sage, 2022). They also edited (with Debra Gray) Collecting Qualitative Data: A Practical Guide to Textual, Media and Virtual Techniques (Cambridge, 2017) and have websites on thematic analysis (www.thematicanalysis.net) and story completion (www.storycompletion.net).

Yvonne Wengström

Professor
Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Yvonne Wengström is an oncology nurse and has worked in cancer care since 1989 and holds a PhD in oncology and is Professor in Nursing. She holds a joint position between the university and the hospital and currently works as a Director of Nursing development at Karolinska comprehensive Cancer Center at Karolinska University Hospital and she is a senior researcher at the Karolinska Institutet and leads a research team at the Department of Nursing.

Dr Wengström has developed her research career with focus on symptom improvement and breast cancer and is now recognised as a nurse leader in projects around screening, innovative interventions using e-health in cancer care, physical exercise studies, experience-based co-design and is an advocate for transferring research outcomes into practice. 

She is also a member of several international committees and has been the President of the European Oncology Nursing Society, has participated as invited speaker at many international conferences, and is widely published. She is one of the founding members of the global network for collaboration the International Learning Committee (ILC) intlearningcollab.org, that focuses on Fundamentals of Care by integrating clinical practice, research, and education to promote excellence in fundamental care and developing research evidence through the systematic investigation of fundamentals of care in healthcare systems globally.

Helena Leino-Kilpi

PhD, MEd, RN, FAAN, FEANS, FRCN, Member of Academia Europea

Helena Leino-Kilpi is a professor (emerita), University of Turku, Faculty of Medicine, and Researcher Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland.

She is internationally well-known expert in nursing and health sciences. Her research is in the fields of health care and nursing ethics, quality of clinical nursing and nursing education. Methodologically, she has expertise from narrative to interventional studies, reviews, statistical modelling and instrument construction. Several her instruments are in large international use.  Altogether, she has published around 600 scientific, referee-based publications, mostly with international collaborators. She also has supervised more than 70 new PhDs in nursing science, and has for years taught research ethics in the European Academy of Nursing Science. She is a board member of the Baltic Sea Region Doctoral Network, and active in Nordic collaboration.  

Leino-Kilpi has several academic duties. She has been the Head of the Department for 20 years, a member of advisory boards of universities, made research evaluations in different countries, and for different funding organizations, and is a member of editorial boards. She is Honorary Doctor in the University of Klaipeda (Lithuania), Fellow of European Academy of Nursing Science, American Academy of Nursing, and the Royal College of Nursing (UK).

Dr. Leino-Kilpi received her nursing degree in the Turku Health Care Institute, Master in Educational Sciences in the University of Turku, Licentiate in University of Tampere and PhD in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Turku (nursing science), Finland. She made a post-doctoral period in New York University (USA) and University of Edinburgh, UK.

Walter Sermeus

Walter SERMEUS is emeritus professor of healthcare management, Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy, University of Leuven KU Leuven, Belgium. He holds a PhD in Public Health, a MSc in Biostatistics, a MSc in Healthcare Management and a BA in Nursing. He is Head of KU Leuven WHO Collaboration Centre on Human Resources in Health Research & Policy.

 He is Senior Fellow to the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School, USA, Fellow of the European Academy of Nursing Science, the American Academy of Nursing, the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of Medicine, UK and the Academia Europaea.

 He is the European coordinator of the EU RN4CAST-network, Nurse Forecasting in Europe and the EU-funded Magnet4Europe study (2020-2023).

 He is president of the Plexus hospital network, consisting of the University Hospital Leuven and the three regional hospitals of Leuven, Diest and Tienen.