Dr Harsha Gunawardena

Dr Harsha Gunawardena is a Consultant Rheumatologist. He is also a Divisional Clinical Director Neurosciences and Musculoskeletal sciences Division at North Bristol NHS Trust. He leads the North Bristol Connective Tissue Disease and Vasculitis, which provides a tertiary regional service for the southwest. He is an integral member of the Bristol-Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) service that runs regional MDT and combined clinic. This combined service has run since 2010 and manages one of the largest CTD vasculitis-ILD patient cohorts in the UK. He has a clinical academic interest in all aspects of CTD and vasculitis, in particular myositis and ILD. His PhD was on myositis syndromes including ILD phenotypes and this work was the first to describe several novel autoantibody markers. He has published on myositis overlap syndromes, autoantibodies, CTD-ILD reviews and guidelines. He is a lead member of UK Myositis network, Myositis UK patient charity scientific committee, and the British Society of Rheumatology Myositis Guidelines Group. He was British Society of Rheumatology Heberden committee member (2019 – 2023), which is responsible for organising the BSR annual conference and he co-convened and chaired the plenary Essentials sessions. He is a member of the BSR ILD guidelines working group.