Felice Rivellese PhD

Felice Rivellese studied Medicine at the University of Naples Federico II. During the final years of his speciality training in Clinical Immunology, with the support of an EULAR bursary and an ARTICULUM (now FOREUM) fellowship, he attended the Department of Rheumatology at Leiden University as a visiting research fellow, where he studied the involvement of cells of the innate immunity in the pathogenesis of inflammatory arthritis. In 2014, he moved to the Centre of Experimental Medicine & Rheumatology at Queen Mary University of London, led by Prof Costantino Pitzalis, and he was awarded a Marie-Curie fellowship, with a project on the Study of Mast cells in Rheumatoid Arthritis, which was also the focus of his PhD in Clinical Pathophysiology and Experimental Medicine, with sub-specialization in Immunological and Rheumatologic Sciences (PhD thesis).

In 2018, he was awarded a Transitional Research Fellowship by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), with a project on the study of Synovial B cells to inform treatment response in Rheumatoid Arthritis (SyBRA). During this time, he transitioned from basic/laboratory research to clinical research, acquiring new skills in clinical trials, epidemiology, and bioinformatics, as he was actively involved in the setup, delivery, and analysis of stratified medicine clinical trials in inflammatory arthritis.

In January 2022, Dr Rivellese was appointed as Clinical Senior Lecturer and he is currently managing the EMR Clinical Research Team, where he is responsible for joint ultrasound assessment and ultrasound-guided synovial biopsies, coordinating a team of 2 nurses, 3 clinical trial practitioners and 2 clinical fellows at PhD level. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Translational Bioinformatics, where he collaborates with Prof Michael Barnes and Dr Myles Lewis and their teams on several research projects in stratified medicine. Dr Rivellese is a member of the EULAR Council (European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology). He is Past-Chair (2021-2022) of the EMEUNET (Emerging EULAR Network) Committee, and he is a member of the EULAR Research Committee.