Bevra H. Hahn, MD, was chief of rheumatology at the University of California, Los Angeles for 30 years. She retired in 2012 and is currently working part-time preparing educational materials, teaching, lecturing, serving on several boards, and seeing inpatients and outpatients with fellows. Her expertise is in systemic lupus erythematosus.

Joan T. Merrill, MD, is member and director of clinical projects, Arthritis & Clinical Immunology Research Program, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF); OMRF professor of medicine, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center; and adjunct professor of medicine, New York University Langone Health. She is also chief advisor for clinical development for the Lupus Foundation of America and director of the 20-year-old Oklahoma Lupus Cohort, a resource providing serial clinical evaluations and blood samples from more than 650 patients with systemic lupus, incomplete lupus, or primary antiphospholipid syndrome.

During her career, she has provided medical care for more than 1000 patients with lupus and has played leading roles in the design, execution, and analysis of many multicenter clinical trials of new treatments for lupus. At the OMRF, she has been awarded multiple government grants and contracts with pharmaceutical companies to perform small studies that link immune phenotypes to treatment efficacy. She has worked closely with colleagues Drs Judith James and Joel Guthridge to extend these studies to both government- and pharmaceutical-sponsored multicenter trials. She is an emeritus member of the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics and performs autoantibody testing for many of their ongoing projects.

Dr Merrill has more than 290 peer-reviewed publications, including primary papers, review articles, invited commentaries, and book chapters.

George C. Tsokos, MD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA. His laboratory has led the field of molecular abnormalities on immune cells in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and has identified previously unknown pathways that have served as the basis for novel treatments currently in various phases of development. More recently, he has launched studies to decipher the interaction between immune and kidney resident cells and to identify local processes that enable renal injury. 

Dr Tsokos has served in various leadership positions, including president of the Clinical Immunology Society, the member of the boards of directors for the American College of Rheumatology and the Lupus Foundation of America, member or chair of multiple federal study sections, and editor or member of the editorial boards for top scientific journals.

He holds a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health and has received several prestigious awards, including the Kirkland, Lee C. Howley Sr. Prize, and Evelyn V. Hess awards; the Distinguished Basic Investigator Award from the American College of Rheumatology; the Lupus Insight Prize from the Lupus Research Alliance; the Carol Nachman Prize for Rheumatology; and the Dr. Marian Ropes Physician Achievement Award. He is a Master of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Rheumatology.