Dr. Alime Büyük 

Alime Buyuk, MPT, Ph.D. is a pelvic health physiotherapist, academician and clinical investigator in the field of pelvic floor health in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation at Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey. Her interests include chronic myofascial pelvic pain and dysfunction and pelvic health physiotherapy. She received her Master’s degree from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey in 2016.

Alime is a highly acclaimed educator and has given many invited lectures and taught hands-on workshops for physiotherapists and other clinicians in several countries including the UK, Germany, USA, Palestine, Turkey and Canada.

Since 2016, Alime has been conducting her doctoral research and part time has been at Sherbrooke University, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Department, LaboMorin Urogynecology Laboratory in Quebec, Canada. She is an advisory board member of the International Pelvic Pain Society (IPPS) and is very active in organizing international meetings of the IPPS. She is also co-founder of the International Pelvic Health Institute and has been organizing and teaching local pelvic health educational scientific courses and workshops for physiotherapists in her native Turkey for the past 7 years.

In 2021, Alime was selected by the IPPS to be an advisory board member, and she also became, notably, the first physiotherapist and foreigner (i.e., non-American) to ever receive the prestigious Dr. Fred Howard Early Investigator Award for her novel and clinically impactful studies on chronic pelvic pain.

Dr. Caterina Fede

Caterina Fede, Ph.D. graduated in Biotechnology and in Health Biology and received her Ph.D. in Environmental Medicine, University of Padova, Italy. She works at the Institute of Human Anatomy at the University of Padova, on the research team of Prof. Carla Stecco. Dr. Fede’s research work is fully devoted to the comprehension of microscopic characteristics of fasciae. 

She has participated in numerous national and international conferences as presenter, including Fascia Research Congress 2022 and 2018 and Australian Fascia Symposium 2020. She is author of numerous research papers (56 documents on Pubmed) on cellular and molecular aspects of fascia, in particular the quantification of hyaluronan, the characterization of fasciacytes, the innervation of deep and superficial fascia. Moreover, the characterization of how various stimuli and conditions (like hormones and chemical conditions) can modify the fascial tissue and its properties is a key part of Caterina’s research, and it plays a crucial role in the analysis of fascial functionality and for the investigation of pathological phenomena. 

Caterina is also Author of the chapter “Molecular Aspects of Fascia”, in the book “Fascia. The tensional network of the human body”, Elsevier 2022. Winner of the 2019 University Cooperation call, as short-term scholar at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, with a project about the visceral fascia (with Prof. Wells RG and Prof. Theise N., New York University School of Medicine), and winner of the "Fascia Research - Young Scientist Award", conferred in 2020 by the Fascia Research Charity. 

Dr. Robert Schleip

Robert Schleip Ph.D. is director of the Fascia Research Group (Technical University of Munich & Ulm University, Germany) and Research Director of the European Rolfing Association. After several decades of clinical practice and teaching in the Rolfing method of Structural Integration and in Feldenkrais Movement Education, he started a research sabbatical in 2004 due to his personal dissatisfaction with his own scientific explanations of the working mechanisms behind these methods. This became a life changing re-orientation, as he soon became so excited and passionate by the novel findings which he - together with several other researchers - helped to unravel, that he became a driving force for the first international Fascia Research Congress (Boston 2007), which paved the road for an unprecedented increase in scientific attention to the former cinderella tissue called 'fascia'. 

Robert's own research findings on active fascial contractility were honored with the esteemed Vladimir Janda Award. His current research attention links his previous academic studies in psychology (at Heidelberg University) with newly understood dynamic fascial properties. In this inquiry he loves to collaborate with many other curiosity driven international colleagues from different professional fields. More about his work at www.somatics.de and www.fasciaresearch.de