Speaker Spotlight

Dr. Upton is Division Head of Immunology and Allergy at The Hospital for Sick Children and Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto. She serves on the Board of the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the Healthcare Advisory Board of Food Allergy Canada. She earned her MD from Western University, completed residency at McMaster, fellowship at Toronto, and an MPH at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Her clinical practice addresses immunodeficiency and allergy, with research focused on children with food and vaccine allergies and those with immunodeficiencies. 

S Shahzad Mustafa is the division head of allergy, immunology, and rheumatology at Rochester Regional Health. In addition to seeing both pediatric and adult patients, Dr. Mustafa participates in clinical research, with a special interest in quality of life considerations in food allergy, and secondary immunodeficiency due to malignancy and chemotherapeutics. In hopes of optimizing the patient experience, Dr. Mustafa focuses on quality initiatives and improving systems of healthcare delivery. 

Emeritus Fellow of both the AAAAI and ACAAI. Pediatric residency at Washington University, St. Louis. Fellowship in Allergy & Immunology at the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, Denver, Colorado. Former Senior partner, Allergy Consultants, P.C. 40 years in private practice in St. Louis, Missouri. Current President, THE PBL Institute, LLC. He has facilitated hundreds of educational conferences in the A./I. field nationally, involving interactive case discussions known as “problem-based learning” or PBL. He has initiated PBL workshops into both the AAAAI and ACAAI annual meetings, the Eastern Allergy Conferences yearly for the last 21 years.

Richard L. Wasserman, MD, PhD is Medical Director of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at Medical City Children’s Hospital and Vice President of the Food Allergy Support Team.  

An honors graduate of Hobart College, he received a PhD in immunology from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and his MD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School (UTSWMS). Following training in pediatrics and fellowships in bone marrow transplantation and immunology at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he served on the faculty of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School for 33 years and directed the Immunology Clinic for 19 years. In 1988, Dr. Wasserman started a private practice in allergy/immunology and a research group that has conducted more than 130 FDA-approved studies. He has served as a member of the AAAAI Board of Directors and the Editorial Boards of JACI: In Practice, Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, Frontiers in Allergy, and the Journal of Food Allergy. He has co-authored more than 175 peer-reviewed publications, case reports, book chapters, and reviews. Dr. Wasserman has been a leader in food allergy treatment. He co-founded the Food Allergy Support Team and has moderated the annual FAST food allergy treatment conferences.

Dr. Sami Bahna is Professor Emeritus and former Chief of Allergy/Immunology at Louisiana State University- Shreveport. He published 215 papers, 40 book-chapters, and a book on "Allergies to Milk" which was translated into Italian, Russian and Japanese. He served on editorial boards of several medical journals on allergy/immunology and pediatrics. He served on several national and international societies and was President of the American College of Allergy/Asthma/Immunology He received many national and international recognitions and prestigious awards, including  Distinguished Service, International Distinguished Fellow, Humanism in Medicine, Life-time Achievement Gold-Headed Cane, and was named among the World’s Top 2% Scientists. 

Director of the Clinical Research Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and the S.Jean Emans, MD, Endowed Chair & Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, conducts innovative, NIH-funded community, school, and home-based studies focused on reducing health disparities) and directs a renowned multidisciplinary program built from scratch. She has had continuous NIH funding for 23 years. Currently, she is ranked among the top five worldwide asthma experts in the past decade, as determined by Expertscape. She has authored over 460 publications in scientific journals and is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, honor research societies, and is an associate editor for JACI.

Dr. Phipatanakul is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of investigators, providing guidance on achieving balance between work and family, supporting over 150 trainees to achieve their own independent careers and has received multiple mentoring awards from Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the AAAAI.

Dr. Bukstein is a board-certified allergist/ immunologist and pediatric pulmonologist. He holds hospital staff appointments at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical Center, in Madison and Waukesha Memorial Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He worked as a pediatric intensive care physician for 17 years at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical Center. He has been active in resident education and was an Assistant professor of Family Practice and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin for over 30 years. He serves as a fellow of the American Academy of Allergy Asthma & Immunology; the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology; and the American Thoracic Society. Dr. Bukstein is considered a national expert in using clinical outcomes for managed care. He has had numerous articles published in peer-reviewed journals, including The American Journal of Managed Care, Allergy, Pediatrics, and Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management. He also gives approximately 50 presentations annually at national and international meetings. These presentations have focused on allergic disease, asthma, quality of life, health outcomes and telemedicine. 

Dr. Rider serves as a Professor in the Department of Health Systems & Implementation Science at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke Virginia. He runs CHILI, the computational human immunology lab and innovation hub, which focuses on advancing epidemiologic and predictive analyses to inform primary immune disease patient outcomes and biological discovery. Additionally, he is an Associate Chief Medical Information Officer focused on research data operations and a Clinical Immunologist at the Carilion Clinic.  Dr. Rider is board-certified in Allergy-Immunology and Clinical Informatics.