Professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School and a full-time faculty member of the Department of Otolaryngology and Communications Enhancement at Boston Children’s Hospital.

I have spent my career in Boston, MA practicing Heotology/neurotology and skull base surgery.  I’ve worked to develop minimally invasive endoscopic surgical techniques in this field and developed new procedures for Eustachian tube disorders.  My research activities focus on otitis media and disorders of the Eustachian tube, specifically investigating the inflammatory basis of Eustachian tube dysfunction and conducting research on novel medical and surgical treatments.  I came to Boston Children’s hospital in 2003 after spending nine years in private practice and I previously worked at Tufts Medical Center and Lahey Clinic.  In 2011, I completed a PhD at the University of Tampere, Finland in Pathophysiology and Surgical Treatment of the Eustachian tube and did postdoctoral work with the NanoEar European Union consortium on nanotechnology for targeted delivery of inner ear and middle ear therapy.  I now work to develop new methods to understand and treat Eustachian tube disorders, offering these techniques to my patients and teaching others internationally in these methods.  I run the International Eustachian Tube Study Group and I serve as the principle investigator for two multicenter clinical trials of Balloon Eustachian Tuboplasty.

Philosophy of Care

It has been a rewarding privilege to be able to serve my patients over the many years of my career to date.  Although I initially trained in Bio-Medical Engineering, I knew that my calling would be in caring for patients.  I have devoted my efforts to taking the best possible care of my patients, who are like my family when they are under my responsibility.  Additionally, I have always pursued research into finding better ways to improve upon that care.  Equally important has been my goal of training other doctors and surgeons to share in my values and to benefit from my experience.  Ear and communication disorders are among the most common and disabling problems worldwide and it became my mission to work on the means to try to prevent these problems from occurring or worsening.  We have been fortunate enough to make significant advances in these goals, creating new understanding of some of the diseases, developing diagnostic methods and surgical therapy that is making a difference in the outcomes in our patients.  Joining Boston Children’s Hospital brought to me the opportunity to increasingly focus my efforts for treating these diseases in the most vulnerable times of our patients’ lives. 

​Mr Mark Puvanendran is a Consultant Otorhinolaryngologist Head & Neck and Thyroid Surgeon working at Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford, Mid Essex Hospital NHS Trust.

In addition to his general and paediatric ENT practice, Mark has an interest in thyroid, salivary gland and head and neck oncological surgery. He is a member of the Essex multidisciplinary head and neck and thyroid oncology teams, a tertiary service for complex head and neck oncology and thyroid surgery. Providing cancer services to Chelmsford, Southend, Basildon and Colchester.

His areas of expertise lie in Head and Neck Oncological Surgery, Thyroid, and Salivary gland surgery. He is the first Trans Oral Robotic Head and Neck Surgeon in the East of England.

Special interests

Thyroid surgery, salivary gland surgery, pharyngeal pouch surgery, head and neck cancer, laryngeal disorders and benign head and neck disorders.

Ramon Franco Jr, MD is a Board-Certified Otolaryngologist based at Mass Eye and Ear and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.  A graduate of the Penn State University School of Medicine, he completed his residency at SUNY Downstate followed by a fellowship in Laryngology and Professional Voice at Mass Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School.  He has been an active member of the Otolaryngology department at Harvard for the past 20 years, serving as the Medical Director for the Voice and Speech Lab and the Laryngology Fellowship Director, and is the immediate past Director of the Division of Laryngology.  As a dedicated educator he can be found at many local, national and international conferences, as an organizer or invited lecturer and participates in many “mission” trips to teach and operate with local faculty in various countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

His clinical interests include the treatment of airway stenosis, voice disorders and laryngeal cancer.  Over his career he has helped to move procedures from the operating room to the clinic setting where they can be done with less morbidity to the patient.  These include the pioneering use of angiolytic lasers for the treatment of leukoplakia and papillomatosis, ALA photodynamic therapy for recurrent leukoplakia, photochemical tissue bonding to approximate tissue without sutures and creating the SILSI technique to allow outpatient treatment of airway stenosis.  His main research interest is the understanding of how SILSI modifies airway stenosis, both molecularly and clinically.

Dr Nupur Kapoor Nerurkar is an ENT surgeon, who has graduated in 1994 from KEM Hospital with a first rank in the Bombay University. Following her Laryngology training on the Hargobind Fellowship in 2003 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, she initiated a Voice Clinic at Sion Hospital, where she was an Associate Professor at that time.

Since 2004, she is practicing exclusively as a Laryngologist and is currently heading the Bombay Hospital Voice & Swallowing Center. Dr. Nerurkar is also the DNB Co-ordinator of the ENT Department at Bombay Hospital and Director of the Laryngology Fellowship program.

Dr Nerurkar is a fellow of the American Broncho-Esophagological Association as well as the American Laryngological Association and an Executive Committee member of the International Association of Phonosurgeons. She is a past President of the Association of Phonosurgeons of India (APSI) and currently on the Governing Council of the Association.

She is the Chief Editor of the “Textbook of Laryngology” which is the Official Textbook of the APSI and has also authored an “Atlas of Phonomicrosurgery” in 2017. Dr Nupur is currently an Associate Editor of LPV, which is the official publication of the British Laryngology Association and she is also an Associate Editor of the Laryngology Volume of Thieme Publications “Otorhinolaryngology and HNS”. She has over 90 publications and book chapters to her credit and has delivered over 250 presentations in India and abroad including multiple orations.

Dr Nupur has been awarded multiple awards including the Gold Medal in Junior Consultant Award Category, Video Session category and Senior Consultant Award Category at the National A.O.I. Conference, the First Prize at Phonocon 2006 and was awarded the David Howard prize in Laryngology 2012. She has been voted as Mumbai’s Top Doctor in Voice Category in 2012, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020 (Impact Initiative), published in India Today.

Dr Nerurkar has been Course Director of 13 Live Annual Phonosurgery workshops at Bombay hospital to date and multiple Phonosurgery workshops all over the country. This year due to the Covid Pandemic the 14^th Annual Workshop was conducted as a webinar with over 1000 registered delegates.

Dr Debbie Phyland is a speech pathologist having primarily worked for the past 33 years in acute hospital settings, part-time lecturing in voice, neurological and dysphagia subjects and running her private voice practice. Debbie is also a music theatre singer-performer combining her love of performance with her speech pathology career, bringing voice medicine to the performing arts. In 2002, she was the recipient of a Churchill and Kilpatrick Fellowship and travelled to the USA and Europe to study occupational voice management.

As well as being a co-founder and owner of the Melbourne Voice Analysis Centre team, Debbie is the principal speech pathologist (SP) for her private practice Voice Medicine Australia (a team of 8 speech pathologists). She is appointed as Associate Professor for the School of Clinical Sciences, Monash University working part-time as Director of Clinical Research Director for the ENT Head and Neck Department of Monash Health.

For twenty years Debbie has been the resident voice consultant for Melbourne Theatre Company and countless professional productions including Matilda, Kinky Boots, Mary Poppins, WarHorse, King Kong, Lion King and Les Misérables. She was the recipient of a Victorian Green Room Award ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Melbourne Stage’ in 2012. Along with Fellowship category (2014), Debbie has also been honoured with the prestigious Speech Pathology Australia Association’s Elinor Wray Award (2010) for ‘Outstanding contribution to the profession’ and an Australian Voice Association Award for ‘Outstanding contribution to the Australian voice community’ (2014).

Debbie is well published and regularly invited to present at international conferences. Her research and clinical interests include neurolaryngology, professional and occupational voice disorders, outcome measurement, voice assessment and rehabilitation. 

Dr Lucian Sulica is the Sean Parker Professor of Laryngology and Director of the Sean Parker Institute for the Voice (https://voice.weill.cornell.edu) of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. His practice is limited to voice disorders. He has a special interest in medical and microsurgical treatment of injuries of the vocal fold from voice use, particularly in performers, and in neurologic voice disorders, including vocal fold paralysis and paresis, spasmodic dysphonia and tremor. Dr Sulica has also been a leader in the development of procedures for the treatment of voice disorders in the office, without the need for general anesthesia. 

Dr Sulica's research and clinical investigations have been devoted to establishing clear, evidence-driven principles for the treatment of voice conditions. They have addressed basic factors in injury to the vocal folds from voice use, including important gender differences; the pathophysiology and natural history of laryngeal nerve injury; diagnostic accuracy in voice disorders and outcomes in surgical and behavioral treatment of benign vocal fold lesions. Dr Sulica has published frequently cited works on the safety and utility of vocal fold injection in the awake unsedated patient, the use of botulinum toxin for voice disorders, treatment of vocal fold paralysis and a host of other topics. In all, Dr Sulica has authored more than 90 journal articles and 40 book chapters. He has edited two books, Vocal Fold Paralysis and Classics in Voice and Laryngology. He is as passionate about teaching as he is about clinical care and research, and has lectured extensively in the United States and Europe, Latin America and Australia.

Dr Sulica serves as Secretary of the American Laryngological Association, and is a member of the American Bronchoesophagological Society and the American Laryngologic, Rhinologic and Otologic Society (the Triologic Society).