Two full days of curated content covering the latest evidence, clinical pathways and real world cases. Plenary sessions, focused tracks and time for questions with the people defining the field today.
Known as 'the future whisperer of healthcare', Lucien Engelen is a strategist and innovator working at the intersection of technology and patient empowerment. He leads Transform.Health and brings over three decades of healthcare innovation experience, including 25 years in ambulance services and dispatch centres, founding director of the Radboud University Medical Center REshape & Innovation Center (2007 to 2018) and founder of the National Health(care) Innovation School, followed by global roles at Vodafone, Deloitte and Sanofi, and currently AI Impact Accelerator for Maastricht University Medical Center. One of the first 100 LinkedIn Influencers worldwide, his work has featured on TED, the BBC, The Guardian and Dutch national television. His keynote, 'The future of healthcare in the age of AI', looks at shifting the system from fixing problems to preventing them, at which technologies will genuinely shape clinical work in 5, 10 and 25 years, and at how we keep the human in the loop.
Prof. Maria Giulia Marini is an educator, epidemiologist and counsellor with the European Narrative Medicine Society (EUNAMES). Her keynote, 'Narrative Medicine in Lifestyle Medicine', explores how patients' stories deepen care and communication. She also leads a workshop at the congress, 'When Illness Comes: Cosmologies and Narrative Medicine'.
Evidence-based nutrition in practice, from food as medicine to nutritional prehabilitation before surgery.
PresentersProf Sunil Kumar, MD (United Kingdom)Victoria Pena Acuna (Belgium)Zuzanna Zielinska (Netherlands)
Cardiovascular prevention and heart health through evidence-based lifestyle change.
PresentersProf. Robert Kelly, MD, PhD (Ireland)Sophie Millar, PhD (Belgium)Prof. Klaudia Vivien Nagy, MD, PhD (Hungary)
Sexual, hormonal and reproductive health across the lifespan, from fertility and men's hormonal health to menstrual pain and PCOS.
PresentersIoan Hanes, MD (Belgium)Karoline Frey, MD (Switzerland)Milli Raizada, MD (United Kingdom)Els Pastijn, MD (Belgium)
How environmental exposures, food systems and climate shape our health, from pesticides to the gut-kidney-brain axis.
PresentersEleni Prifti, PhD (Netherlands)Philippe Weinssenberg-Anaboli, MPH (Belgium)Prof. Giorgos Sakkas, PhD (Greece)
Applying lifestyle medicine in daily clinical care, from oral health and cancer prevention to population-wide prevention of chronic disease.
PresentersSahar Haroon, MD (Switzerland)Betzabel Cajiao Garcia, PhD (Curaçao)Prof. Christina Karatzaferi, PhD (Greece)Eric A. Gershman, MD (USA)
The habits and environments that extend healthy years, translated into everyday clinical practice.
PresentersProf. Marcelo Fiszman, MD, PhD (Brazil)Ioannis Arkadianos, MD (Greece)Prof. Michel Poulain, PhD (Belgium)
How communities, workplaces and social connection shape long-term health.
PresentersProf. Andrée Rochfort, MD, PhD (Ireland)Babai László, MD (Hungary)
Anne Funk is a journalist, coach and consultant, and the founder of her own coaching method, Légèreté, which she describes as lifestyle medicine in practice. She hosts the Talks: she opens each round table, introduces in everyday language what the speakers will cover, and guides the questions from the room. Between round tables she also points you towards the workshops and Self-Care Ateliers running on floor 26.
The speakers taking part in the ELMO 2026 round tables.
Dr Babai László is a licensed physician and one of Hungary’s leading advocates of lifestyle medicine. He believes health is shaped primarily by the choices and environments of everyday life, well beyond the walls of the healthcare system, a conviction that led him to found the “Mozgás Receptre” (Exercise on Prescription) programme in Hungary. His talk revisits the 1986 Ottawa Charter, comparing health trends since then across the United States, Canada, the European Union and Hungary, and asks whether we need a new framework for creating health in everyday life.
Dr Eric Gershman is a medical oncologist and hematologist with Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute. He trained at Louisiana State University and NYU Medical Center, and brings more than 30 years of experience as an attending physician and Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 2026 he joined the Lifestyle Medicine and Wellness Immersion Program at Harvard Medical School. A member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, he speaks on sleep disorders in people treated for cancer, their causes, their treatment through the pillars of lifestyle medicine, and the link between sleep and survival.
Sahar Haroon is a dentist and CEO of the Swiss Longevity Dental Boutique. At ELMO 2026 she explores oral health as a key pillar of lifestyle medicine and healthy ageing.
Betzabel Cajiao Garcia leads projects at Fundashon Prevenshon. She presents Vita, a population-based prevention program tackling the heavy burden of non-communicable diseases in Curaçao.
Dr Ioannis Arkadianos is a medical doctor and President of the European Lifestyle Medicine Organization (ELMO). He speaks on lifestyle medicine and longevity.
Philippe Weinssenberg-Anaboli is a public health professional. He examines how our lifestyle choices shape agrifood systems, biodiversity loss and antimicrobial resistance — from the fork to the farm.
Zuzanna Zielinska is an environmental nutritionist. She shares her 'Food is Medicine' work, including produce-prescription programs for type 2 diabetes patients in Rotterdam.
Dr Milli Raizada is a UK General Practitioner, Senior Clinical Lecturer at Lancaster Medical School, lifestyle medicine physician and researcher with a specialist interest in women's hormonal and metabolic health. She is undertaking a PhD at Lancaster University investigating metabolic dysfunction in PCOS, is a Fellow of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine and author of the bestselling book 'Happy Hormones, Happy You'. Her talk, 'PCOS Beyond Weight: The Metabolic Story We Are Missing', shares insights from lean and non-lean phenotypes and their implications for lifestyle care.
Professor Georgios K. Sakkas is Professor of Clinical Exercise Physiology at the Department of Physical Education and Sport Science, University of Thessaly, Greece, and Academic Director of the International MSc in Lifestyle Medicine. He holds a PhD in Clinical Exercise Physiology from Manchester Metropolitan University and completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco. His research focuses on therapeutic exercise and lifestyle-based, non-pharmacological interventions for people living with chronic diseases, with particular interests in kidney disease, sleep disorders, neuromuscular health, rehabilitation and quality of life. His talk is 'The Climate Within Us: How Lifestyle and Environmental Stress Shape the Gut-Kidney-Brain Axis'.
Dr Sunil Kumar is an anaesthesiologist, dual board-certified Lifestyle Medicine Physician, and the Lifestyle Medicine Lead at the WHO Collaborating Centre at Imperial College London. He is the creator of the PeriopLM framework and author of 'The Power of Preparation for Surgery'. He has spoken in over 15 countries on prehabilitation, prevention and healthcare transformation. His talk, 'Surgical Fuel: Nutritional Prehabilitation in the Perioperative Pathway', reframes nutrition as a core component of surgical prehabilitation, building metabolic reserve, muscle mass and immune resilience to drive better outcomes and faster recovery. The core message: recovery is built before the incision, not after it.
Ioan Hanes, MD is Vice-president of the European Lifestyle Medicine Organisation (ELMO), founder of the Belgian Lifestyle Medicine Organisation (BELMO) and Coordinator of the 7th European Lifestyle Medicine Congress. His talk covers lifestyle intervention and male fertility.
Karoline Frey is a fourth-year Obstetrics and Gynaecology resident in Fribourg, Switzerland, certified in Lifestyle Medicine (ELMO, 2026), with interests in women's health, sexual and reproductive health and preventive medicine. Her talk, 'No Pill, No Problem: Rethinking Dysmenorrhea', explores evidence-based lifestyle strategies for menstrual pain.
Victoria Pena Acuna is a clinical dietitian and health coach. Her talk, 'Beyond Eat Mediterranean: Building an Evidence-Based Nutritional Framework for Lifestyle Medicine', moves past generic dietary advice towards a structured, evidence-based framework.
Eleni Prifti is an environmental health researcher with the European Lifestyle Medicine Organization. She presents the ELMO Environmental and Planetary Health Hub and Certificate, and her work turning pesticide science into a practical lifestyle medicine approach.
Professor Christina Karatzaferi is Professor of Exercise Physiology and Myology and Dean of the School of Physical Education, Sport Science and Dietetics at the University of Thessaly, Greece. She holds an MSc in Exercise Physiology from Loughborough University and a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University, with research and teaching appointments in the United Kingdom and the United States, including the University of Edinburgh and the University of California, San Francisco. Her research lies at the intersection of skeletal-muscle physiology, biophysics, metabolism, fatigue, ageing and chronic disease. Her talk is 'Lifestyle Oncology: From Cancer Prevention to Supportive Care Through Lifestyle Medicine'.
Professor Michel Poulain is the demographer who scientifically identified the original Blue Zones. He also leads the Longevity track on Friday, opening the day with the history of the Blue Zones and the seven Living Blue Zone principles.
Marcelo Fiszman is a physician and biomedical informatics researcher at PUC-RJ. His work brings artificial intelligence, semantic interoperability, biomedical ontologies and knowledge graphs together to make lifestyle medicine computable, representing and integrating lifestyle factors with clinical and biomedical data. His talk also shows how AI can help explain the mechanisms underlying salutogenesis by combining biological, behavioural, environmental and psychosocial evidence, including emerging research on nutrition and the gut microbiome, and sets out the informatics infrastructure needed to translate lifestyle interventions into scalable, interoperable healthcare solutions.
After twenty years as an anaesthesiologist in academic hospitals, Els Pastijn moved her focus to preventive medicine. Working in high-performance environments gave her a broad medical foundation, but it also showed her the consequences of suboptimal health guidance: countless women with hip fractures, vascular problems and more that earlier intervention might have prevented. That led her to specialise in menopause, lifestyle medicine and sports medicine. She now runs one-to-one consultations for women in (peri)menopause, lectures at a college training menopause consultants, and speaks publicly on midlife health, hormones and the role of movement and sport in lifelong health.
We look after the people who look after everyone else. Alongside the program, seven short restorative sessions are open to every attendee — sound healing, QiGong, a Chinese tea ceremony, and practical ateliers on communication, career design and financial wellbeing. No registration, no reserved seat, no extra cost.
Discover the Self-Care AteliersAny question about registration? Email us at registrations@elmo2026.org.
