NRS Webinar-Closing the Gaps: Addressing Disparities in Obstructive Lung Disease

NRS Webinar-"Closing the Gaps: Addressing Disparities in Obstructive Lung Disease"

26 November 2026.

Dr. Sami Simons “health disparities in patients living with COPD”

Dr. Berber Kapitein “The influence of disparities on intensive care outcomes in children with respiratory diseases”

Dr. Sami Simons is a consultant in respiratory medicine at Maastricht University Medical Centre (MUMC) and an assistant professor in respiratory medicine at Maastricht University (UM). Dr Simons clinical and research interest is in airways diseases. He also leads the respiratory postgraduate clinical training program at MUMC and teaches respiratory physiology in the undergraduate training program at UM.

Dr. Simons leads the voice analytics laboratory. His team co-develops digital technologies with people with chronic respiratory diseases and is specifically focusing on vocal biomarker development. His work spans the full spectrum of digital technology research, from developing machine-learning algorithms based on voice and speech (vocal biomarkers), to the co-creation of mobile platforms through design thinking and the subsequent testing of such digital solutions in clinical trials. His research is sponsored by grants from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Lung Foundation Netherlands (Longfonds), and the MRC/FAPESP. He is principal investigator of the DACIL and SPEAK consortium and board member of the P4O2 consortium and the COST action eVoiceNet network.

Dr. Berber Kapitein works as a consultant at the pediatric intensive care unit at the Emma Children’s Hospital in Amsterdam and is a researcher focusing on disparities in severe acute asthma. Her two main research projects focus on participative action research with parents and children and policy makers and indoor air pollution. She also is the project leader on adding air pollution data in the electronic patient files at their academic medical center and participates in the Equal Opportunities Clinic at the department of Pediatric Pulmonology.

NRS webinars are free for our members. Members will have received the link to the webinar via mail on 12 October. If you have not received the link, please contact nrs@nrs-science.nl

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