Professor Virendra K Arya, currently working as Visiting Professor Anesthesiology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada is Professor of Anesthesiology and Cardiac Anaesthesia at Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India. Dr Arya was instrumental in starting 3-year DM cardiac anesthesia training programme and developing specialty anesthesia for Heart, Lung and Liver transplant, and ECMO support programme at PGIMER Chandigarh. India. PGIMER is first government hospital to do Lung transplant in India. He started anaesthesia resident training exchange programme between university of Manitoba Canada and PGIMER India anesthesia department in 2011. He is on editorial board of Canadian Journal of Anesthesia (CJA). He has 47 publications to his credit and his specialty of interest is high spinals for fast track in cardiac surgery, trans-esophageal and trans thoracic echocardiography in anesthesia, and role of human factors and emotional intelligence in perioperative medicine. He is faculty for annual meetings of Indian Association of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesiologists (IACTA), Indian society of anaesthesiologists (ISA) since 2000 and also faculty for annual meetings of American society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) for conducting refresher course lectures and workshops on perioperative transthoracic echocardiography (POCUS) since 2015. Apart from national and international contributions as faculty for anesthesia society meetings, he has conducted grand rounds for anesthesia residents at University of Manitoba, Canada, University of Los Angeles (UCLA), University of North Carolina, in USA, University of Western Australia, Perth and University of Melbourne, Austin Hospitals in Australia since 2008.

André first studied at the University of Pretoria. After Internship he started working at a Mission Hospital (Letaba Hospital) in the Northern parts of South Africa. During 1975 he participated in Operation Savannah as the only anesthesiologist for No 1 Forward Surgical Unit stationed at Céla in Angola with Genl. Tony Dippenaar. He was awarded the Pro Patria medal with Cunene Clasp and during that time he developed the first recorded continuous peripheral nerve blocks (CPNB) for transport of wounded soldiers. He then entered private General Practice with his brother Louis, first in Sabie and later in Tzaneen in the Northern parts of South Africa. During the next seven years he obtained a Master’s degree in Family Medicine from the University of Pretoria (M.Prax.Med.). He completed residency in Anesthesiology at the University of the Witwatersrand and obtained a Diploma in Anesthesiology (DA(CMSA)), Fellowship of the Faculty of Anesthesiologists (FFA(CMSA)) and a Master’s degree in Anesthesiology (M.Med.(Anaesth) and underwent further training in Critical Care Medicine (CCM). He entered Private Practice in Cape Town and Paarl in South Africa in 1989 and focused on CCM, Ambulatory Continuous Regional Anesthesia, and completed a Ph.D. degree at the University of Stellenbosch studying cerebral blood flow under Professor André Coetzee. He developed the “stimulating catheter”, the continuous cervical paravertebral block, and documented over 15,000 peri-retrobulbar eye blocks and, to date, over 26,000 continuous peripheral nerve blocks. During 2001 he immigrated to the USA where he worked as Clinical Full Professor at the University of Iowa and founded the Division of Orthopaedic Anesthesia and the Regional Anesthesia Study Center of Iowa (RASCI). In 2007 he relocated to the University of Florida in Gainesville Florida and was appointed Full Tenured Professor of Anesthesiology and Orthopaedic Surgery. He founded and headed the Division of Acute and Peri-operative Pain Medicine (APPM) that currently educates 7 fellows per year, has 12 full-time APPM specialists, does 13,000 nerve blocks per year of which 75% are CPNBs. He received numerous awards including Best Doctors in America from 2005 to 2019/20, numerous teaching and research awards, and is the holder of 7 international patents. He authored over 120 peer-reviewed papers, 10 textbooks, more than 60 textbook chapters and serves on the editorial boards of 5 international journals and reviews manuscripts for 16 journals. He presented over 250 international abstracts at major conferences and with Mary K. Bryson was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the Frank Netter Foundation for “The Primer for Regional Anesthesia Anatomy” for medical illustration in 2005. André retired from the UF on June 30, 2019 and now hold Emeritus Professor Status. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of RAEducation.com, Director of the Alon P. Winnie Research Institute and Director of the Cancer Pain Treatment and Research Foundation.

I am an anaesthetist working in the National Health service in the United Kingdom. I work at Torbay hospital, which is in Devon. I am 52 years old (survived, hurray!) My median life expectancy is about another 39 years. I also work as an intensivist in our intensive care unit. The third place that I work is in the preoperative assessment clinic. My work in all three places – preoperative assessment, anaesthetics and intensive care – has led to my main areas of interest: long-term survival, including my own; perioperative probabilities of harm and benefit; cardiopulmonary exercise testing; evidence-based medicine including systematic reviews. My other area of interest is the detection of data fabrication and fraudulent research. I have published on these subjects in a number of papers in journals and chapters in books. I am an editor for the journal Anaesthesia. I have been involved in the cases of fraud by Fujii and his co-author Saitoh. I have been involved in detecting cases of fraud in unpublished papers submitted to Anaesthesia, as well as other journals, including EJA, AIC and AAS. My work led to the retraction of the PREDIMED paper in the NEJM.

Michelle Chew is Academic Chair and Professor in Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care and Acute Care at Linköping University Hospital, Sweden. 

Professor Chew’s research interests revolve around the heart in the high-risk patient, perioperatively and during critical illness. Additional research focuses on perioperative outcomes. She is an executive member of the Swedish Perioperative Registry, the Scandinavian Clinical Practice Guidelines Committee, Deputy Chair for the Health Services and Research Outcomes section and faculty member for the European Diploma of Advanced Echocardiography for the ESICM. She is also associate editor for the European Journal of Anaesthesiology.

Professor Emmanuel Malabo Makasa works on Wellness/Health Policy in the Zambian Civil Service – Public Service Management Division (PSMD) and he is the Director of the Wits Centre of Surgical Care for Primary Health and Sustainabble Development as well as Honorary Adjunct Professor for Global Surgery in the Department of Surgery, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He prioviouly served as Assistant Registrar Licensure of the Health Professionals Council of Zambia, as the Republic of Zambia’s Global Health Diplomat at the United Nations in Geneva and Vienna (2012-2017) during which time he chaired and led negotiations resulting in resolution WHA67.15, WHA68.15 and Decision WHA70(22).He was technical coordinator of the “African Health Experts” - Health Attachés from the African Union’s Permanent Missions at the UN in Geneva for the year 2014. A distinguished orthopaedics and trauma surgeon turned global health diplomat with senior management experiance at the Zambian Ministry of Health as Deputy Director responsible for Emergency Health Services, Prof. Makasa was Secretary General of the Zambia Medical Association (2007-2008) and Secretary General of the Surgical Society of Zambia (2006-2007). He is an honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and the College of Surgeons of East Central & Southern Africa (COSECSA). He serves on the Advisory Boards of the G4 Alliance, the Lusaka Orthopaedics Research & Education Trust (LORET) and Africa Directions (AD) a community based Lusaka NGO. He has served in the past as an honorary Lecturer at the University of Zambia, School of Medicine; was a Visiting Scholar (2018) of the American College of Surgeons (ACS); the Hugh Greenwood Lecturer (2017) at the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons (BAPS) and the A J Orenstein Lecturer (2017) at the University of Witwatersrand, RSA.

Dr Janet Martin is Associate Professor of Anaesthesia & Perioperative Medicine and Epidemiology & Biostatistics at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Canada. She is Director of MEDICI (Centre for Medical Evidence, Decision Integrity & Clinical Impact), a WHO Collaborating Centre for Global Anaesthesia & Perioperative Care. She is recognized for local and global leadership in clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, health technology assessment, and knowledge translation related to anaesthesia and perioperative care. She is most passionate about supporting contextually-relevant research and health policy to expedite access to safe, effective, timely, affordable surgery and anaesthesia-related care for all. She teaches courses on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based decision-making, and knowledge translation. She is involved in developing globally-relevant policy and guidelines with the WHO. Recently, she was awarded Distinguished Leader of Excellence in Graduate/Postgraduate Education at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, and the Medical Advisory Committee Award for Evidence-Based Medicine. In 2019, she was awarded the Anniversary Medal for National Leadership in Health Technology Assessment at the Canadian Agency for Drugs & Technologies in Health.

Gladness Nethathe received her medical degree from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She subsequently trained as an Anaesthetist and Intensivist at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, in Soweto, South Africa where she obtained  her Master of Medicine Degree and Diploma in Health Science Education from the University of the Witwatersrand. She obtained the Diploma in Anaesthesia, Fellowship of the College of Anaesthetists of South Africa and Certificate in Critical Care from the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa.

She has worked in teaching hospitals in South Africa as well as in Australia since 2015, and is a Fellow of the College of Anaesthetists of Australia and New Zealand. Gladness has an interest in medical education and is actively involved in a number of teaching and educational roles within her Department and University. Over the years she has been involved in the delivery of courses for Anaesthesia and Intensive Care internationally.

She is currently a PhD candidate and a Staff Specialist at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Department of Anaesthesia and Perioperative medicine. Her research interests include aspects of the neuroendocrine stress response in patients with trauma and sepsis as well as obstetric critical care.

Rupert Pearse graduated in 1996 from St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, UK. After time working in general medicine and anaesthesia, he returned to St George’s Hospital where he developed many of his current research interests and completed his training in Intensive Care Medicine. In 2006, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Intensive Care Medicine at Queen Marys University of London and was recently promoted to Professor. He has now given up anaesthesia to concentrate on his clinical duties on the intensive care unit at The Royal London Hospital and his research interests in improving outcomes following major surgery. Rupert plays a leading role in a number of large multi-centre studies including ISOS, METS, PRISM, OPTIMISE II and EPOCH.

Honorary Professor and Consultant in Anaesthesia and Critical Care, University of Leicester and University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Leicester UK. I am current editor-in-chief of BJA Education and was previously an editor of the British Journal of Anaesthesia (2008-2017).   I am an editorial board member of the British Journal of Anaesthesia and Perioperative Medicine.  Other current roles include being co-director of the University of Leicester Diagnostic Development Unit and an expert advisor to the British National Formulary.  Previously I have served as a member of the ESA Pharmacology Subcommittee, Chairman of the Vascular Anaesthesia Society of Great Britain & Ireland, and an examiner for the Primary FRCA examiner for the Royal College of Anaesthetists.  I have had external examining duties at several universities in the UK as well as for the Post Graduate Institute of Medicine, Colombo, Sri Lanka.  In 2011 I was awarded the Macintosh Professorship of the Royal College of Anaesthetists. In addition to many lectures at national meetings in the UK I have given invited talks at several meetings of the European Society of Anaesthesiologists, the World Congress of Anaesthesiologists, the Japanese Society of Intensive Care Medicine, the Irish National Congress of Anaesthesia, the Chinese Society of Anesthesiologists, the European Vascular & Endovascular Society and the International Regulatory Peptide Society. My clinical work is in the general adult ICU at the Leicester Royal Infirmary covering all major acute medical and surgical specialties except cardiac and neurosurgery, with approximately 1500 admissions to ICU per year. Our hospital covers a population of c. 1 million and our Emergency Department has the highest number of attendances per year of any ED in the UK. I have led clinical research in anaesthesia and critical care teams in Leicester and the East Midlands for over 18 years and my current research interests include: novel non-invasive monitoring modalities in acute illness; and the effects of endogenous opioids on vascular function and immune modulation in sepsis. Major collaborators include Professors DG Lambert, T Coats and MR Sims, University of Leicester; Dr Girolamo Calo, University of Ferrara, Italy; and Professor Felipe dal Pizzol, University of Extremo Sul Catarinense, Criciuma, Brazil).  I have published over 70 original research articles, 30 book chapters, 30 educational reviews, 10 editorials, 10 review articles and 2 invited journal volumes. I have edited 3 textbooks and most recently was senior editor of the 7th edition of Smith & Aitkenhead's Textbook of Anaesthesia (published 2019).