An interview with the MDS President

[00:00:45] David Burn: You're very welcome, Michele. It's lovely to be here.

[00:00:48] Michele Matarazzo: So before I ask you a few questions, I will start with a message that I have to deliver to you. And I'm gonna read this because it's important that I I say those exact words.

Last year when I was in Honolulu at the end of my interview with Victor Fung I asked him if there was any message that he wanted me to give you for this year. And he said that he had watched you serve the society in many important roles over the years, and that he had learned an enormous amount about leadership from you.

And then he finished with a line that I will read right now. He said, "I have no advice to give him except to say, 'Don't follow me, because I've been following him, and that will be a circle." So David one year later, what is your reaction to Victor's message?

[00:01:34] David Burn: Oh, that's classic Victor. He's a wonderful colleague. It's been an absolute delight working with him when he was president, and obviously now with Susan Fox as well as president-elect to me.

We've been blessed really by having such wonderful colleagues. Victor is very humble and I think he, as we say, hides his light under a bushel. He's got a huge number of skills as well as abilities and I've picked up quite a bit from watching him in action. I appreciate his advice, but I don't think we're going round in a circle.

[00:02:05] Michele Matarazzo: And you awarded him this year?

[00:02:07] David Burn: Absolutely. No, that was a real joy. That's one of the really lovely things about being president. You get to hand things out to people and recognize their achievements. And with Victor being a longstanding friend and colleague, we go back many years, that was a particularly meaningful moment for me.

[00:02:23] Michele Matarazzo: Now, looking more specifically at the society, what would you highlight as the main thing or the most important things that MDS has accomplished over this past year?

[00:02:32] David Burn: Yes, the society's obviously becoming more and more complex. It's becoming wider in its scope. And I think for me, the thing that I'm taking great pleasure on is that we, at the transition really between Victor's presidency and mine, worked and co-chaired actually the development of the new strategy based around the four pillars, which hopefully everybody is now at least reasonably familiar with. And when you see the strategy laid out with the objectives beneath the four pillar titles, it really encapsulates to my mind what the society's all about.

And then to put out requests to all the many groups, committees, task forces, special interest groups and so on to ask them to submit ideas that would actually flesh out those objectives and to see the quality of the material that came back was a real thrill. And so we spent quite a lot of time, particularly the secretariat, combing through that and coming out with the sort of common themes and so on to populate the strategy.

And then the next thing has been, of course, how one would then implement those. And when we most recently then looked at the strategy, when we looked at the implementation, we've really seen how things have already in the past 12 months moved on against the strategic objectives. So I take great pleasure in that because I think the idea of, education being a key pillar, research excellence, scientific excellence being great, advocacy is obviously a massive thing, and sustainability in all its guises.

I don't think there are many members of the society who wouldn't say that they're not all really important, but there's some substance underneath that. And then the other aspect, very quickly, is that during his term, Victor set up a couple of really important initiatives. The one was the patient and carers group, and then the other one was around the equality of access to care.

And obviously, I've taken very much on board to maintain the momentum in those areas and to try to keep them going and to see the patient and carer group flourish under Steve Frucht and Camille Carroll and now up and live and running. And if any listeners are wanting to know more about it, then I would urge them to check it out because we're now at the stage of asking our colleagues, our physician colleagues, our allied health professional colleagues, to spread the message to their patients and carers to get them to sign up to this very important initiative.

So that I see as a sign of great development. Then other things that are in progress, which again, I'll just give a little heads-up to the membership for, is we're obviously keen to embrace the artificial intelligence revolution, if you will. We don't want to get caught by it.

And there are a few initiatives and topics that we're looking at there to try and really stay abreast of things as best as we can. That one in particular is important. The other thing that we're exploring and it is only exploratory at this stage, is whether we can do something with clinical research networks, both formed and emerging, to try to share best practice, to try and share experiences across the different countries that have these networks

[00:05:47] Michele Matarazzo .: Great. So a lot of things accomplished and a lot of things to do in the close future. And, some of these things will take years for sure. Now the MDS field itself is changing remarkably quickly. AI is just one of these things. Like also biomarkers, biological definition of disease, genetics, as you were mentioning, digital technologies.

What role do you think the MDS should play in the field and in a field that is changing so quickly?

[00:06:15] David Burn: Yeah, I think it's a great question. The MDS, despite being a very large organization, and as our listeners may know, we've literally for the first time ever gone past 13,000 members, which is just fantastic, and the membership is very much reflective across the whole of the globe. Despite our size, I still think we're quite agile, and I think we're able to flex and adapt to changes.

I'll give an example. Although we don't fund research to any great extent, we just don't have the budget to do that, and perhaps you would argue it's not necessarily our primary purpose, but we have convening power and advocacy power. And the convening power has been exampled by a task force on diagnostic criteria for Parkinson's, which we'd hoped to get through and to be able to profile a little at the conference in Seoul.

Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the case, but we are at advanced stage of getting a publication out there and that will, I hope, make sense of what is a very complex field with two, I won't say competing classifications, 'cause there's a huge amount of overlap between the NSD and the synergy classifications, but it's a scaffold that will hopefully make sense to clinicians across the globe as to how they might reconcile those two classifications and how they could see there is scope for the future, but equally how with the tools that we have to hand now, accepting that not everyone has access to all of the high-end wet biomarker assays, et cetera, et cetera, that good old-fashioned clinical diagnosis still has a place.

[00:07:54] Michele Matarazzo: That's a very important message. Thank you for that. And I also wanted to ask you, because the, the MDS is a growing global and diverse organization. Now a lot of the membership are clinicians but do you have anything in mind also to stay close to the basic scientist and the non -MD health professionals, all the other members that are not fully clinicians, but they are very much involved in the society and very important for the field itself?

[00:08:23] David Burn: Yeah, another fantastic question. And really we're very mindful of the heterogeneity amongst the membership. As you say, Michele, I mean, if you look at it in one pie slice, you're seeing that the vast majority of our members are clinicians, and we always have to be aware of that, particularly when structuring the main congress.

But if you cut the pie, say, for example, on an age demographic, we're predominantly a young society and we love that. We have a majority of members who are 40 or less. And even within that, because that's quite a relatively high bar for being defined as young, there is great heterogeneity within that.

So you have undergraduates, you have, people who are at advanced stage of fellowship or maybe even appointed. And so, I guess what I'm saying is that we're, we need to be broad church. And to your specific point, we're very mindful of the fact that we need to do more in basic science and more in allied health professionals in particular when it comes to the job families.

Because basic science or discovery science absolutely feeds the machine that ultimately down the line leads to clinical impact and benefit. We ignore basic science at our peril, and we're really grappling with how we try to make the meeting more appealing to basic science without making them think on often what, let's be honest, are more limited budgets and salaries than clinicians that their appearance at a meeting would be a waste of time.

And I've seen, as we all have, meetings, perhaps I'm thinking now more of regional meetings, where it can be more successfully pitched to have a greater representation of basic science and some fantastic discussions. Really high-end discussions. And it's very exciting. And I think clinicians, particularly clinic academics, feed off that kind of interaction.

So we've got to think of the right way of pulling in more basic science and retaining them. Likewise, allied health professionals. From the company discussions that I have here at this meeting and previously, we know that companies are very interested in talking to nurses because they know nurses have time to spend with patients, that they are really knowledgeable and can be of huge value when it comes to introducing new therapies.

So again, we just need to think of a creative ways that we can appeal to these groups. And one such initiative might be what we introduced this year through the International Congress Oversight Committee, where we had, for example, the Pediatric Special Interest Group, Neurosurgery Special Interest Group, who put forward programs within a program.

And that might be a way of pulling in a wider constituency and then hopefully retaining them for the rest of the main congress.

[00:11:03] Michele Matarazzo .: Fantastic. Now we're talking about the congress. Now we are more than halfway the congress, and I can just imagine how busy you've been so far. But I've, seen you in the plenaries and, and in general all, all around and following the congress closely. Do you have any highlight of the congress so far or anything that you want to highlight for the rest of the listeners here?

[00:11:25] David Burn: Yes, thank you. So I think, firstly, I thought the session on aging and Parkinson's was spectacular. Fantastic to hear about the pathological, the brain bank resource really from Japan, I believe it was. And then obviously I'm slightly biased because the second speaker was one of my former trainees who's now very much independent in her own right.

And I was sat there probably more nervous than she was, but I needn't have worried because, Alison did an absolutely amazing job. And then she was followed by an equally spectacular speaker who interestingly had worked with Victor Fung and Stephen Lord ex-Newcastle.

And again, everybody was thinking, "Oh wow, I want to be a neurogeriatrician." I mean, He was just fantastic. So that I thought really ticked the box on the theme of this congress. I thought it was great. And then the presidential session, which Susan Fox and I had the honor really of chairing to hear BJ and to hear Vincenza talk and then the two wonderful junior talks as well, which were very different, was, was-- I've had fantastic feedback about that.

And I know I'm biased 'cause I was chairing it, but I really thought that was very good.

[00:12:33] Michele Matarazzo .: And I'll take advantage of that last highlights to say that there are also podcast episodes interviews to those four speakers: BJ, Vincenzo Bonifati, and also for the Junior Awards.

Now finally let's look ahead to next year. When we sit down again at the next congress, which is gonna be in Amsterdam, and when I ask you next year, "David, has this been a good year for the MDS?"

What would need to have happened for your answer to be yes?

[00:13:00] David Burn: I think that we would hope that the initiatives that I've referred to and the various ideas that we've talked about to try to implement the strategy — I would like to be passing the strategy on to Susan in a year's time in a really good state of delivery. And I think, they're too numerous to go into here, but I would really like to see progress, that we're ticking the box on all the medium-term objectives and starting to move into some of the delivery of the long-term objectives.

I would like to see the membership continuing to grow. Not that I'm competitive, but it would be great to see Europe take a greater slice of the pie, although it has definitely under Jean-Christophe Corvol started to increase its membership. So I would like to see us keep on going past the 13,000 mark.

I would love to be told that we've got over 5,300 registrants for Amsterdam, which I think at the moment is our aspiration. And I would love to see that we're getting lovely feedback from the young members and other groups to show that we've listened to their requests because we've got some fabulous groups, the young members group is definitely one of them, which we're trying to accommodate within the strategy and the delivery of. I'll highlight the Women in Movement Disorders group, again, incredibly active with some fabulous ideas. Pediatrics in movement disorders, neurosurgery.

These are groups that have jumped out at me in the last year as being like really putting forward ideas. And I would also like to see, finally, the fantastic work that Alvaro and Tiago are doing in the clinical outcomes assessment a bit more widely recognized. They are unsung heroes in my view. They are actually bringing in huge amounts of income, I should say, for the society, which really exceeds our expectations.

But moreover, the tools that they're producing I'd like to see that is more widely recognized and that pipeline continues to be healthy and to deliver in the coming year.

[00:14:55] Michele Matarazzo .: Fantastic. So David, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for your work. Next year, r-remember you have to come prepared. You have to come with a message for for the next president, Susan Fox. So I hope to sit again with you next year, and I look forward to it. Thank you

[00:15:13] David Burn: Thanks, Michele

[00:00:07] Michele Matarazzo: Hello, and welcome to the "MDS Podcast," the official podcast of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. I am Michele Matarazzo, editor of the podcast, and today we are recording live from Seoul at the 2026 International Congress. Every year at the congress, we sit down with the president of the society to take a broader look of the MDS: where we are, what has been accomplished over the past year, perhaps even more importantly, where the society's heading for the future.

And this year, we are sitting for the first time with the president of the MDS Professor David Burn. David, thank you very much for joining me.

[00:00:45] David Burn: You're very welcome, Michele. It's lovely to be here.

[00:00:48] Michele Matarazzo: So before I ask you a few questions, I will start with a message that I have to deliver to you. And I'm gonna read this because it's important that I I say those exact words.

Last year when I was in Honolulu at the end of my interview with Victor Fung I asked him if there was any message that he wanted me to give you for this year. And he said that he had watched you serve the society in many important roles over the years, and that he had learned an enormous amount about leadership from you.

And then he finished with a line that I will read right now. He said, "I have no advice to give him except to say, 'Don't follow me, because I've been following him, and that will be a circle." So David one year later, what is your reaction to Victor's message?

[00:01:34] David Burn: Oh, that's classic Victor. He's a wonderful colleague. It's been an absolute delight working with him when he was president, and obviously now with Susan Fox as well as president-elect to me.

We've been blessed really by having such wonderful colleagues. Victor is very humble and I think he, as we say, hides his light under a bushel. He's got a huge number of skills as well as abilities and I've picked up quite a bit from watching him in action. I appreciate his advice, but I don't think we're going round in a circle.

[00:02:05] Michele Matarazzo: And you awarded him this year?

[00:02:07] David Burn: Absolutely. No, that was a real joy. That's one of the really lovely things about being president. You get to hand things out to people and recognize their achievements. And with Victor being a longstanding friend and colleague, we go back many years, that was a particularly meaningful moment for me.

[00:02:23] Michele Matarazzo: Now, looking more specifically at the society, what would you highlight as the main thing or the most important things that MDS has accomplished over this past year?

[00:02:32] David Burn: Yes, the society's obviously becoming more and more complex. It's becoming wider in its scope. And I think for me, the thing that I'm taking great pleasure on is that we, at the transition really between Victor's presidency and mine, worked and co-chaired actually the development of the new strategy based around the four pillars, which hopefully everybody is now at least reasonably familiar with. And when you see the strategy laid out with the objectives beneath the four pillar titles, it really encapsulates to my mind what the society's all about.

And then to put out requests to all the many groups, committees, task forces, special interest groups and so on to ask them to submit ideas that would actually flesh out those objectives and to see the quality of the material that came back was a real thrill. And so we spent quite a lot of time, particularly the secretariat, combing through that and coming out with the sort of common themes and so on to populate the strategy.

And then the next thing has been, of course, how one would then implement those. And when we most recently then looked at the strategy, when we looked at the implementation, we've really seen how things have already in the past 12 months moved on against the strategic objectives. So I take great pleasure in that because I think the idea of, education being a key pillar, research excellence, scientific excellence being great, advocacy is obviously a massive thing, and sustainability in all its guises.

I don't think there are many members of the society who wouldn't say that they're not all really important, but there's some substance underneath that. And then the other aspect, very quickly, is that during his term, Victor set up a couple of really important initiatives. The one was the patient and carers group, and then the other one was around the equality of access to care.

And obviously, I've taken very much on board to maintain the momentum in those areas and to try to keep them going and to see the patient and carer group flourish under Steve Frucht and Camille Carroll and now up and live and running. And if any listeners are wanting to know more about it, then I would urge them to check it out because we're now at the stage of asking our colleagues, our physician colleagues, our allied health professional colleagues, to spread the message to their patients and carers to get them to sign up to this very important initiative.

So that I see as a sign of great development. Then other things that are in progress, which again, I'll just give a little heads-up to the membership for, is we're obviously keen to embrace the artificial intelligence revolution, if you will. We don't want to get caught by it.

And there are a few initiatives and topics that we're looking at there to try and really stay abreast of things as best as we can. That one in particular is important. The other thing that we're exploring and it is only exploratory at this stage, is whether we can do something with clinical research networks, both formed and emerging, to try to share best practice, to try and share experiences across the different countries that have these networks

[00:05:47] Michele Matarazzo .: Great. So a lot of things accomplished and a lot of things to do in the close future. And, some of these things will take years for sure. Now the MDS field itself is changing remarkably quickly. AI is just one of these things. Like also biomarkers, biological definition of disease, genetics, as you were mentioning, digital technologies.

What role do you think the MDS should play in the field and in a field that is changing so quickly?

[00:06:15] David Burn: Yeah, I think it's a great question. The MDS, despite being a very large organization, and as our listeners may know, we've literally for the first time ever gone past 13,000 members, which is just fantastic, and the membership is very much reflective across the whole of the globe. Despite our size, I still think we're quite agile, and I think we're able to flex and adapt to changes.

I'll give an example. Although we don't fund research to any great extent, we just don't have the budget to do that, and perhaps you would argue it's not necessarily our primary purpose, but we have convening power and advocacy power. And the convening power has been exampled by a task force on diagnostic criteria for Parkinson's, which we'd hoped to get through and to be able to profile a little at the conference in Seoul.

Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the case, but we are at advanced stage of getting a publication out there and that will, I hope, make sense of what is a very complex field with two, I won't say competing classifications, 'cause there's a huge amount of overlap between the NSD and the synergy classifications, but it's a scaffold that will hopefully make sense to clinicians across the globe as to how they might reconcile those two classifications and how they could see there is scope for the future, but equally how with the tools that we have to hand now, accepting that not everyone has access to all of the high-end wet biomarker assays, et cetera, et cetera, that good old-fashioned clinical diagnosis still has a place.

[00:07:54] Michele Matarazzo: That's a very important message. Thank you for that. And I also wanted to ask you, because the, the MDS is a growing global and diverse organization. Now a lot of the membership are clinicians but do you have anything in mind also to stay close to the basic scientist and the non -MD health professionals, all the other members that are not fully clinicians, but they are very much involved in the society and very important for the field itself?

[00:08:23] David Burn: Yeah, another fantastic question. And really we're very mindful of the heterogeneity amongst the membership. As you say, Michele, I mean, if you look at it in one pie slice, you're seeing that the vast majority of our members are clinicians, and we always have to be aware of that, particularly when structuring the main congress.

But if you cut the pie, say, for example, on an age demographic, we're predominantly a young society and we love that. We have a majority of members who are 40 or less. And even within that, because that's quite a relatively high bar for being defined as young, there is great heterogeneity within that.

So you have undergraduates, you have, people who are at advanced stage of fellowship or maybe even appointed. And so, I guess what I'm saying is that we're, we need to be broad church. And to your specific point, we're very mindful of the fact that we need to do more in basic science and more in allied health professionals in particular when it comes to the job families.

Because basic science or discovery science absolutely feeds the machine that ultimately down the line leads to clinical impact and benefit. We ignore basic science at our peril, and we're really grappling with how we try to make the meeting more appealing to basic science without making them think on often what, let's be honest, are more limited budgets and salaries than clinicians that their appearance at a meeting would be a waste of time.

And I've seen, as we all have, meetings, perhaps I'm thinking now more of regional meetings, where it can be more successfully pitched to have a greater representation of basic science and some fantastic discussions. Really high-end discussions. And it's very exciting. And I think clinicians, particularly clinic academics, feed off that kind of interaction.

So we've got to think of the right way of pulling in more basic science and retaining them. Likewise, allied health professionals. From the company discussions that I have here at this meeting and previously, we know that companies are very interested in talking to nurses because they know nurses have time to spend with patients, that they are really knowledgeable and can be of huge value when it comes to introducing new therapies.

So again, we just need to think of a creative ways that we can appeal to these groups. And one such initiative might be what we introduced this year through the International Congress Oversight Committee, where we had, for example, the Pediatric Special Interest Group, Neurosurgery Special Interest Group, who put forward programs within a program.

And that might be a way of pulling in a wider constituency and then hopefully retaining them for the rest of the main congress.

[00:11:03] Michele Matarazzo .: Fantastic. Now we're talking about the congress. Now we are more than halfway the congress, and I can just imagine how busy you've been so far. But I've, seen you in the plenaries and, and in general all, all around and following the congress closely. Do you have any highlight of the congress so far or anything that you want to highlight for the rest of the listeners here?

[00:11:25] David Burn: Yes, thank you. So I think, firstly, I thought the session on aging and Parkinson's was spectacular. Fantastic to hear about the pathological, the brain bank resource really from Japan, I believe it was. And then obviously I'm slightly biased because the second speaker was one of my former trainees who's now very much independent in her own right.

And I was sat there probably more nervous than she was, but I needn't have worried because, Alison did an absolutely amazing job. And then she was followed by an equally spectacular speaker who interestingly had worked with Victor Fung and Stephen Lord ex-Newcastle.

And again, everybody was thinking, "Oh wow, I want to be a neurogeriatrician." I mean, He was just fantastic. So that I thought really ticked the box on the theme of this congress. I thought it was great. And then the presidential session, which Susan Fox and I had the honor really of chairing to hear BJ and to hear Vincenza talk and then the two wonderful junior talks as well, which were very different, was, was-- I've had fantastic feedback about that.

And I know I'm biased 'cause I was chairing it, but I really thought that was very good.

[00:12:33] Michele Matarazzo .: And I'll take advantage of that last highlights to say that there are also podcast episodes interviews to those four speakers: BJ, Vincenzo Bonifati, and also for the Junior Awards.

Now finally let's look ahead to next year. When we sit down again at the next congress, which is gonna be in Amsterdam, and when I ask you next year, "David, has this been a good year for the MDS?"

What would need to have happened for your answer to be yes?

[00:13:00] David Burn: I think that we would hope that the initiatives that I've referred to and the various ideas that we've talked about to try to implement the strategy — I would like to be passing the strategy on to Susan in a year's time in a really good state of delivery. And I think, they're too numerous to go into here, but I would really like to see progress, that we're ticking the box on all the medium-term objectives and starting to move into some of the delivery of the long-term objectives.

I would like to see the membership continuing to grow. Not that I'm competitive, but it would be great to see Europe take a greater slice of the pie, although it has definitely under Jean-Christophe Corvol started to increase its membership. So I would like to see us keep on going past the 13,000 mark.

I would love to be told that we've got over 5,300 registrants for Amsterdam, which I think at the moment is our aspiration. And I would love to see that we're getting lovely feedback from the young members and other groups to show that we've listened to their requests because we've got some fabulous groups, the young members group is definitely one of them, which we're trying to accommodate within the strategy and the delivery of. I'll highlight the Women in Movement Disorders group, again, incredibly active with some fabulous ideas. Pediatrics in movement disorders, neurosurgery.

These are groups that have jumped out at me in the last year as being like really putting forward ideas. And I would also like to see, finally, the fantastic work that Alvaro and Tiago are doing in the clinical outcomes assessment a bit more widely recognized. They are unsung heroes in my view. They are actually bringing in huge amounts of income, I should say, for the society, which really exceeds our expectations.

But moreover, the tools that they're producing I'd like to see that is more widely recognized and that pipeline continues to be healthy and to deliver in the coming year.

[00:14:55] Michele Matarazzo .: Fantastic. So David, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for your work. Next year, r-remember you have to come prepared. You have to come with a message for for the next president, Susan Fox. So I hope to sit again with you next year, and I look forward to it. Thank you

[00:15:13] David Burn: Thanks, Michele