Leadership is about having a vision and sharing it with others to inspire and develop new ideas. Leadership is also about people: helping those you work with to grow and be the best they can be.
Judith Safford trained as an economist (Dr. rer. pol) in Germany and has dedicated her professional life to excellence in non-profit management. Affected by spondyloarthritis and colitis since early adulthood, she is also a cancer survivor. Her special interest is the involvement of patients in healthcare, particularly through their participation in medical research. She is co-founder and President of the RheumaCura Foundation, which advocates for people-centred arthritis research. Furthermore, she is executive director of the SCQM foundation (Swiss national registry of inflammatory rheumatic diseases) and engages as a patient expert in research projects, including an SNSF funded project at the University Hospital of Zürich. She writes a blog at arthritisandme.ch. Exercise is essential to her health management, so she sneaks off to the Alps whenever time permits to tramp along a snowy mountain slope or scamper up a rock wall.