Most importantly, we have come to understand the unique insights that patients offer into managing their own disease and have developed tools that make patients active team members in most effectively treating their SLE.

My time in Chicago made me much more focused on collaborative research because that is the only way that you can address the variabilities that patients bring — from different sites and different races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic classes. For example, some of our diseases vary in severity to some extent by ethnicity.