Karyn is a single mom living in Boca Raton, Florida. Prior to COVID-19, Karyn received a Bachelor's degree in exercise science and health promotion. She led an active, athletic life and worked as a firefighter and paramedic. After acquiring SARS-CoV-2 in March 2020, Karyn developed Long COVID and its associated conditions, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which left her disabled and unable to work.

Karyn is the Founder & President of the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, whose mission is to advance the understanding of Long COVID and assist people living with Long COVID through advocacy, education, research  and support. The organization offers support groups in all 50 US states and several special population groups, including pediatrics, educators, and first responders. Karyn organized some of the earliest research surveys of Long COVID patients, finding that more than 1/3 of Long COVID patients were being diagnosed with a form of dysautonomia. Karyn is also a Co-Founder of the Long COVID Alliance, which seeks to transform our understanding of post-viral syndromes through COVID-19 research.

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Dr. Chung is a board-certified neuromuscular physiatrist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After graduating from Catholic University Medical College in South Korea, he joined the South Korean Army as a general practitioner. He then completed residency training in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, followed by neuromuscular fellowship training in the Department of Neurology, both at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Chung is a member of the Academic Association of Physiatrists and the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He also serves on the Medical Advisory Board of the Myositis Association. 

Dr. Chung’s research is focused on neurometabolomics, myositis, autonomic disorders, and Long COVID. Clinically, Dr. Chung is interested in various neuromuscular diseases that can result in frailty and disability, and primarily sees patients with myositis, POTS, and Long COVID in his clinics. He founded the Johns Hopkins POTS Clinic and Johns Hopkins Long COVID Clinic, which are multidisciplinary clinics involving multiple departments at Johns Hopkins, including PM&R, Cardiology, Neurology, Pediatrics, and Medicine, among many others.​

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Dr. Hope is an associate professor of pulmonary and critical care and the medical director of the OHSU Long COVID-19 Program. He is a physician-scientist whose research focus is on improving the recovery of adults after acute illness. 

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Prior to joining OHSU, Dr. Hope served 10 years with Montefiore Medical Center, the university hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the COVID-19 Recovery Engagement Clinic at Montefiore-Einstein.  

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Dr. Hope is one of the founding and executive committee members of the Critical and Acute Illness Recovery Organization (CAIRO), a global collaborative of clinicians, researchers and survivors committed to improving long-term outcomes in survivors of acute illness. As medical director of OHSU’s Long COVID-19 program, he is also interested in the best approaches to structure after-care programs for adults with post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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Dr. Komaroff is a specialist in general internal medicine and a clinical epidemiologist. For the past 35 years, he has studied myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness with many similarities to Long COVID.

 

Dr. Komaroff has held several leadership positions, including: Director of the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care within the Department of Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital (1982-1997); Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Health Publications Division of Harvard Medical School; Founding Editor of NEJM Journal Watch General Medicine, a publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society/New England Journal of Medicine (1987-today); Project Principal Investigator on one of the NIH-funded ME/CFS Research Centers; session chair of the NIH conference on neurologic sequelae of COVID-19 and moderator in a two-day NIH conference on the biology of fatigue.

 

Dr. Komaroff has published over 270 research articles, review articles/book chapters and two books. He has served on advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Academy of Medicine. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American College of Physicians.

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Dr. David Lee is an emergency physician at the NYU School of Medicine and an NIH-funded clinician-scientist who studies chronic disease with a focus on improving screening and diagnosis, especially to reduce health disparities. In his prior research, he has developed mathematical models of infectious disease transmission, studied healthcare utilization during disasters, and performed population health research to study the geographic distribution of chronic diseases like diabetes.

 

Since early in 2020, Dr. Lee has been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, taking care of a range of patients with acute COVID-19 from patients with minimal symptoms to critically ill patients. He has been the primary lead researcher for all studies of emergency department utilization and outcomes among COVID-19 patients at NYU. He has led clinical trials for acute hospitalized COVID-19 patients, including an ongoing multi-center randomized control trial. These studies have focused on interventions to improve oxygen delivery for severely hypoxic COVID-19 patients. In addition, he has been involved in basic science studies to understand the pathophysiology of acute COVID-19. He has led a study of anti-Annexin A2 antibodies, which antagonize a critical lung-protective protein and might explain the hallmark clinical features of severe COVID-19.

 

More recently, Dr. Lee has been studying Long COVID with a particular focus on identifying biomarkers that might explain the pathogenesis of the debilitating condition. He has enrolled a cohort of Long COVID patients with POTS and is assessing the possible role of antiphospholipid antibodies and autoantibodies to adrenergic and muscarinic receptors. Dr. Lee looks forward to the day when we will better understand how to treat both acute and Long COVID and also have a healthcare system better suited to addressing patients with undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and poorly understood chronic diseases.

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Karen became ill with presumed COVID-19 in March 2020 and subsequently given a clinical diagnosis of post-COVID syndrome or Long COVID. She is an active volunteer with the UK advocacy group Long COVID SOS, which has been raising the need for Recognition, Research and Rehab for Long COVID patients.

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Karen currently works in the UK clinical research infrastructure as a Business Development Manager.  She has a PhD in developmental genetics. After a period of post-doctoral research, she went into research management. She has worked in the public, charity and commercial sector.

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Dr. Miglis is board certified in neurology and sleep medicine and is fellowship-trained in autonomic disorders and sleep medicine. After receiving his medical degree from the University of Florida School of Medicine, Dr. Miglis completed an internship in Internal Medicine at Georgetown University and a residency in Neurology at New York University. He then completed two clinical fellowships, the first in autonomic disorders and clinical neurophysiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Harvard Medical School and the second in sleep medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. He is currently an Associate Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center.

Dr. Miglis is recognized for his unique focus on the bidirectional link between sleep and autonomic function. His research focuses on postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, REM sleep behavior disorder in early detection and prognosis of Parkinson's disease and related disorders, autonomic dysfunction in primary sleep disorders, and more recently, autonomic and immune dysfunction in Long COVID.

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DVL Padma Priya is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief at Suno India, India's leading podcast platform for underreported stories. She has also worked as a public health advocacy and communication specialist for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Doctors Without Borders. She has over a decade's experience as a journalist and has written for leading media houses in India. For Suno India, she has hosted multiple podcasts on under-reported stories such as "Dear Pari" on adoption, "The Suno India Show" on current affairs, and the award-winning "Pinjra Tod Kar" on womens' empowerment to name a few. Padma Priya is also the founder of India-Covid Survivors group, a Telegram group with over 250 COVID-19 survivors, as well as those with Long COVID. She started the initiative in June 2021 when she was diagnosed with POTS/autonomic neuropathy, a little over a year after contracting COVID-19 in April 2020.

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Dr. Proal is a microbiologist with PolyBio Research Foundation. As Research Team Coordinator for the non-profit, she conceptualizes and coordinates collaborative research projects on infection-initiated conditions such as ME/CFS, Long COVID, and PTLDS. Her work examines the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other organisms can collectively drive human chronic inflammatory disease processes. This includes a focus on how microbial/viral proteins and metabolites can dysregulate human gene expression in a manner that disrupts host immunity and metabolism. She has written papers and book chapters on these topics for organizations including the J. Craig Venter Institute and European Autoimmunity Network, and lectured on the molecular mechanisms of infection-initiated chronic disease at the NIH, the NCI, and at other USA/international conferences.

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Lauren is a marine biologist and attorney turned patient advocate and researcher. She has lived with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) secondary to Sjogren's disease for over a decade. Since co-founding Dysautonomia International in 2012, Lauren has been an outspoken advocate for individuals living with autonomic nervous system disorders. She has lectured on autonomic disorders during U.S. Congressional Briefings and at the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Medical School, Duke University, and beyond. She leads Dysautonomia International's multi-million dollar research grant program, which funds more POTS research studies than any government agency.

Frustrated at the slow pace of research, Lauren began engaging in research with several autonomic labs shortly after she launched Dysautonomia International. She co-leads the largest international POTS research study with Vanderbilt University's autonomic lab, with over 10,000 patients enrolled. She has published over a dozen papers on autonomic disorders. In 2018, Lauren joined the faculty at Stony Brook University School of Medicine as a Research Assistant Professor of Neurology, where she focuses on autonomic disorders research, with an emphasis on immune regulation in autonomic disorders.

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Lauren acquired SARS-CoV-2 in New York City at the very start of the outbreak in February 2020. She experienced Long COVID symptoms for about a year. She is a core member of the Long COVID Alliance and co-leads the first study screening for autonomic dysfunction in Long COVID patients, in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University's autonomic lab. She has also collaborated on the development of Long COVID research studies with researchers at NIH, NYU, Vanderbilt University, University of Utah, UC San Diego, Johns Hopkins and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

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Amy Watson is a mother and preschool teacher from Portland, Oregon. As the founder of the Long Haul COVID Fighters groups on Facebook, she unintentionally coined the term “long hauler” with regard to those dealing with lengthy COVID recoveries and the term became popular around the world. She contracted COVID-19 in March of 2020. Amy now lives with dysautonomia and is still working to recover. In “the before times” she had a love/hate relationship with running and enjoyed hiking and camping in the Pacific Northwest with her partner and two dogs. She now spends her time reading, knitting, and forest bathing. She is committed to supporting her fellow patients via support groups that are exclusively for COVID survivors and spends time promoting public education, awareness, and advocacy on behalf of long haulers. 

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