Gerd Burmester is Professor of Medicine in the Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the Charité University Hospital, Free University of Berlin, and Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany.
Professor Burmester earned his medical degree from Hannover Medical School and completed a residency at the Medical School of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University, New York, USA, and was a visiting scholar at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.
Professor Burmester served as President of the German Society of Rheumatology from 2001 to 2002. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the European League against Rheumatism (EULAR) from 2003 to 2006, Chair of the Standing Committee on Investigative Rheumatology, and became an honorary member of EULAR in 2006. He served as Treasurer of EULAR from 2011 to 2013, and President of EULAR from 2015 to 2017. Since 2017 he has been President of the Board of Trustees of the FOREUM Foundation for Research in Rheumatology.
Professor Burmester is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jan van Breemen medal of the Dutch Society of Rheumatology and the Carol-Nachman prize for rheumatology. He serves on several editorial boards, including the Journal of Rheumatology and Clinical Rheumatology, and is the Associate Editor of the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. The author himself of more than 600 original and review articles, Professor Burmester’s research interests include rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme borreliosis, immunotherapy, cellular activation mechanisms in inflammatory joint diseases, and tissue engineering.