Fernando Pérez-Ruiz, MD, PhD, is Chief of the Rheumatology Division, Cruces University Hospital, Head of the Investigation Group for Arthritis at Biocruces-Bizkaia Health Research Institute, and Associated Professor of the Department of Medicine in the Basque Country University in Vizcaya, Spain.
He received his MD from Basque Country University and a PhD in from Barcelona University with a clinical investigation program on classification and treatment of hyperuricemia in gout. He became Board certified in Rheumatology after a fellowship at Hospital Ramón y Cajal, Madrid.
Dr Pérez-Ruiz is a member of the Spanish Society for Rheumatology and the American College of Rheumatology (ACR). He has collaborated with the European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR) Task Force for Gout and for Calcium Pyrophosphate Disease, the ACR Guidelines for gout, the OMERACT special interest group for gout, and the T2T initiative. He has been Vice-President and Coordinator of Continuing Education of the Spanish Society for Rheumatology (SER) since 2014, Spanish representative in the EULAR Education and Training Committee since 2016, and a member of the Rheumatology Board Commission in the Spanish Health Ministry from 2014 to 2016. He founded and coordinated the Crystal-induced Arthritis Study Group (GEAC-SER) and the SER-Guidelines for the management of gout.
He has served for the last years on the editorial boards of Arthritis Rheumatism, Arthritis Care & Research, Bone Joint Spine, Reumatología Clínica, and Rheumatology & Therapy, as Associate Editor of Rheumatology International, and as an invited reviewer for more than 30 international journals. His research interests include crystal-induced arthritis, and especially gout, but he has also investigated and published on calcium pyrophosphate deposition disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.
Dr Pérez-Ruiz has delivered over 100 lectures, published more than 150 articles and book chapters, and presented over 200 scientific abstracts at rheumatology meetings on topics relating to diverse rheumatology diseases, and most frequently on hyperuricemia and gout, gathering a cumulated impact factor over 1000, and an h-index of 49.