Professor Josef Smolen is professor of Internal Medicine and chairman of the Division of Rheumatology and Department of Medicine 3 at the Medical University of Vienna. He is also head of the 2nd Department of Medicine – Center of Rheumatic Diseases at Hietzing Hospital, Vienna. Prof. Smolen received his MD from the Medical Faculty of University of Vienna, Austria in 1974. He trained at the Institute of Immunology, University of Vienna, and started his residency in Internal Medicine at the 2nd Department of Medicine. He completed his research fellowship at the Arthritis and Rheumatism Branch at the National Institutes of Health in 1981.
Prof. Smolen has served as president of the EULAR from 2003–2005, as president of the Austrian Society of Rheumatology from 2005–2007 and as president of the Austrian Society of Immunology 2007–2009. Since 2003 he is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and since 2007 of the German Academy of Sciences. He became fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians in 2008 and Honorary Doctor of the University of Lund in 2010. Prof. Smolen’s department is a rheumatology referral center, with clinical practice focusing on rheumatoid arthritis (RA), early arthritis, spondylarthropathies, connective tissue diseases, hand osteoarthritis, and osteoporosis.
His main research activities include clinical trials and outcomes research, in addition to laboratory‐based research in the fields of experimental arthritis, autoimmunity, in vivo imaging, proinflammatory cytokines, and cellular immunology. He is editorial board member of several professional journals and editor of textbooks and handbooks in the field of rheumatology.