Chris Lavy, OBE MD MCh FCS FRCS


Chris Lavy is Professor of Orthopaedic and Tropical Surgery and Consultant Orthopaedic and Spine Surgeon at the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS) and a Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. He also holds an honorary chair at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His clinical interests include surgery of the spine, hip and knee, and his research interests focus on surgery in Africa and the Tropics. He has been an elected Council member and trustee of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, and established the annual RCS Global Surgical Frontiers conference. He is a trustee of CURE International UK, which supports children’s reconstructive surgery in resource-poor countries.


During Professor Lavy’s time in Malawi (1996-2006), he helped to set up two orthopaedic teaching hospital and research centres, the Beit CURE International Hospital (2002) in Blantyre and Beit CURE Zambia Hospital (2005) in Lusaka. He helped set up national orthopaedic surgical and clinical officer training programmes in Malawi, and an international clubfoot treatment programme which now spans over 15 countries.


He co-founded the regional College of Surgeons of East Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA) in 1999, set up the college’s orthopaedic fellowship examination and served for many years on the council. Professor Lavy was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List 2007 for services to orthopaedics.


Since moving to Oxford, he has helped set up the Oxford MSc in Musculoskeletal Sciences, and the international Global Clubfoot Initiative, which works to increase collaboration between organisations delivering clubfoot treatment . He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students at Oxford, and has taught on courses such as the popular BMJ Masterclasses series and the LSHTM Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and books, and contributed to Lord Crisp’s report in 2007 on Global Health Partnerships and reports by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health.


He is a Commissioner for The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery, and Co-Director with Associate Professor Hemant Pandit of COSECSA Oxford Orthopaedic Link (COOL), a multi-country programme in trauma and orthopaedics training, research and capacity building in East, Central and Southern Africa. Prof. Lavy has led the Africa Clubfoot Training (ACT) project which focuses on strengthening and expanding clubfoot training in sub-Saharan Africa.


Currently, he is a Principal Investigator for SURG-Africa, an EU-funded collaboration working towards scaling safe surgery for district and rural populations in Africa.

SPEAKERS


Speakers are announced one by one here.

TEASER: there are still 10 speakers to be announced!

Kathleen Casey, MD, FACS


Dr. Kathleen Casey is a surgeon who is passionate about global health and addressing disparities in surgical care. In 2004 she founded the Operation Giving Back program at the American College of Surgeons, which supports the surgical humanitarian ecosystem and fosters collaboration and innovation for the underserved; she served as its Director for 9 years.


She is a founder and one of the architects of the G4 Alliance (the Global Alliance for Surgery, Obstetric, Trauma and Anesthesia Care) - an initiative uniting nearly 100 global organizations in advocating for the neglected surgical patient in global health and development - where she has served as an officer and board member.


Dr. Casey currently serves as Chief Medical Officer for the non-profit Physicians for Peace, President of the Alliance for Surgery and Anesthesia Presence (ASAP), and immediate past-President of the US Chapter of the International Society of Surgery. She has been recognized with Humanitarian Awards from the American Medical Association and the International College of Surgeons and has published widely on global surgery.

Richard Satava, MD, FACS

Professor Emeritus of Surgery, University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, Washington.


Dr. Satava was the surgeon on the project that developed the first surgical robot, which later became the DaVinci Surgical Robot. In addition, as a government official, he funded all of the surgical robot development for the first 10 years, until commercialization became possible. For 5 years he was a member of the Advisory Board of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) advising NASA in surgical robotics, advanced biometric sensing and other life science research for astronauts. Now Dr. Satava has added being continuously active in surgical education and surgical research, with more than 200 publications and book chapters in diverse areas of advanced surgical technology, including Surgery in the Space Environment, Video and 3-D imaging, Telepresence Surgery, Virtual Reality Surgical Simulation, and Objective Assessment of Surgical Competence and Training and the Moral and Ethical Impact of Advanced Medical Technologies.


During his 23 years of military surgery he has been an active flight surgeon, an Army astronaut candidate, combat tours of duty as MASH surgeon for the Grenada Invasion, and a hospital commander during Desert Storm, all the while continuing clinical surgical practice. Prior academic positions include Professor of Surgery at Yale University and a military appointment as Professor of Surgery (USUHS) in the Army Medical Corps assigned to General Surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Government positions included Program Manager of Advanced Biomedical Technology at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for 12 years and Senior Science Advisor at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in Ft. Detrick, Maryland, and Director of the NASA Commercial Space Center for Medical Informatics and Technology Applications at Yale University. He has served on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Committee on Health, Food and Safety and was also awarded the prestigious Department of Defense Legion of Merit and Department of Defense Exceptional Service medals as well as awarded the Smithsonian Laureate in Healthcare.


Upon completion of military career and government service he had continued clinical medicine at Yale University and University of Washington. He is a Past President of the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons (SLS), and the Society of Medical Innovation and Therapy (SMIT).

Ms. Naomi Wright, MRCS


Dr. Wright is a Paediatric Surgery Registrar and PhD Fellow based in London, Surgical Lead for the King's Somaliland Partnership, and Lead of the PaedSurg Africa and Global PaedSurg Research Collaborations. Moreover, she is British Association of Paediatric Surgeons International Affairs Committee (BAPS IAC) Representative and organiser of the Global Initiative for Children's Surgery (GICS).


In 2004/5, Dr. Wright undertook an intercalated BSc in International Health in The Gambia. In 2016/17, she completed an MSc in Global Health with Global Surgery at King's Centre for Global Health & Health Partnerships and a Royal College of Surgeons Research Fellowship to set up PaedSurg Africa, which involved establishing a collaboration of 220 surgeons and anaesthetists across sub-Saharan Africa to undertake the largest prospective cohort study of paediatric surgery in the region.


In October 2017, Dr. Wright started a Wellcome Trust Clinical PhD in Global Health to establish Global PaedSurg, consisting of 1) a multi-centre interventional study aimed at improving survival from gastroschisis in Ghana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, and 2) a global prospective cohort study comparing the management and outcomes of neonates born with a congenital anomaly in low-, middle- and high-income countries.

Lubna Samad, M.D.


Dr. Lubna Samad is a consultant pediatric surgeon with a full time appointment at the Indus Hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. In addition to clinical pediatric surgery, she is committed to improving patient outcomes with a specific focus on LMICs. Her experience in public sector hospitals in Pakistan has informed her understanding of the many individual, social and institutional barriers that result in poor access to, and provision of, quality surgical care. She joined Indus Hospital at its inception in 2007 and has served as Chair of the Indus Hospital Research Center from 2010-2016. Currently, she is Program Director for the Center on Essential Surgery & Acute Care (CESAC) at the Indus Health Network’s Global Health Directorate, working with teams at all Indus campuses to improve surgical care delivery platforms and patient outcomes. As a member of the Permanent Council of the G4 Alliance, she has joined the global momentum to provide care to the neglected surgical patients. She works closely with Harvard Medical School’s Center for Global Health Delivery – Dubai, where she is involved in her capacity as faculty in furthering global surgical research in the region.

Mr. Stuart James Fergusson BSc (Med Sci), MBChB, ChM, MRCS, DRCOG, PGCAP, FHEA

Specialty Registrar in General Surgery and Clinical Leadership Fellow at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow 2016-17


Mr. Stuart J Fergusson graduated MBChB from the University of Glasgow in 2006. He has subsequently trained in general surgery in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and from 2016-17 worked at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow as a Clinical Leadership Fellow. He was a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh from 2012-14 and maintains interests in medical education, global health needs and clinical/educational research. Stuart supports delivery of the Basic Surgical Skills course in Rwanda and has been a core committee member of a multinational surgical research collaborative which has involved over 60 countries (see www.globalsurg.org). In partnership with the Glasgow College’s Director of Global Health, Mr Mike McKirdy, he wrote the College’s report on the value of international volunteering, “Global Citizenship in the Scottish Health Service” (rcp.sg/globalcitizenship). In the future, Stuart hopes to combine his global health interests with a career as a general surgeon in one of Scotland’s six Rural General Hospitals.

Miguel Trelles, MD, MPH, PhD


Miguel Trelles has been the Coordinator of the SAGE Unit (Surgery, Anaesthesia, Gynaecology, Emergency Medicine, and Intensive Care) and the Anaesthesia Advisor to the Medical Department at Médecines sans Frontières (MSF) – Operations Centre Brussels (OCB) in Belgium.


In this position since 2008, he lead the team that provides technical support and supervision for all MSF-OCB activities related to general and orthopaedic surgery, anaesthesia, obstetrics and gynaecology, emergency medicine and intensive care. After changes in the Medical Department at the end of 2017, he is presently in charge of quality assurance in surgical and critical care.


He also collaborates on operational research and has published widely on topics of surgical care during conflict and disasters, global burden of surgical disease, and emergency medicine and intensive care in low resource settings. He joined MSF in 2006 and worked as an anaesthesiologist on different MSF missions in conflict, post-conflict, and low-resource settings.


Born in Peru, he did a specialization in Anaesthesia and Reanimation and was Director of a referral hospital in Huancavelica in the Peruvian central Andes. He has an MD, post-graduated specialisation and a PhD in Anaesthesia from the Odessa University of Medicine, in Ukraine, and an MPH from the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Belgium.

Matthijs Botman, MD, MSc

Plastic surgeon and global health doctor, VU University Medical Center Amsterdam


Matthijs Botman studied Medicine at the University of Amsterdam. He did internships in Peru (pediatrics) and Malawi (surgical training of clinical officers). After obtaining his MD degree cum laude, Matthijs specialized as a global health doctor following the unique Dutch postgraduate training program in global health and tropical medicine (AIGT). From 2009 – 2011 he worked as medical officer in charge in Pokola, Republic of Congo and at the surgery department of Haydom Lutheran Hospital in Tanzania. In 2011 he started his general surgery residency back in the Netherlands. Matthijs was chair of the organizing committee of the international symposium Surgery in low resource settings in 2014 and one of the initiators of the Amsterdam Declaration on Essential Surgical Care. During his training in general surgery he choose to continue further specialization in plastic, reconstructive and handsurgery, a field of surgery that was often very much needed where he had been working in low resources settings.


Currently, Matthijs works as a plastic surgeon at VU University Medical Center Amsterdam. His current activities in global health include leading the campaign Into the World to raise awareness for the work of global health doctors from the Netherlands. He is chief editor of the book Into the World. He is board member of the Netherlands Society of International Surgery (NSIS) and representative of the NSIS in the G4 Alliance. As one of the consultants for ‘consult online’, Matthijs provides quick advices on difficult cases in reconstructive surgery to assist global health doctors in low resources settings. Matthijs is a lecturer in global surgery at VU University Amsterdam and Leiden University. Twice a year, he conducts surgical missions in Tanzania with Doctors of the World. The main focus of this project is the improvement of burn care by the local team. Matthijs is one of the founders and the general director of Global Surgery Amsterdam. He is the supervisor of several research projects that aim to improve burn care in low and middle income countries. Examples of other research projects that he is involved in, are the effectiveness of short surgical missions and the role of video- and simulation assisted learning.

Rachel W. Davis, MD


Seeing that there were gaps in U.S. general surgical education for those planning to practice in resource-limited settings, Dr. Rachel Davis created and led the development of the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Global Surgery Track. Since 2014, she has worked with the BCM Department of Surgery in Houston, Texas to develop educational opportunities in global surgery, including collaborating with the National School of Tropical Medicine and BCM Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology to create a diploma course in Tropical Surgery, Obstetrics, and Gynecology. Now in her second year of Global Surgery Fellowship training, Dr. Davis has operated in Ecuador, Guatemala, Malawi, Mongolia, Nepal, and Tanzania, and has worked with Dr. Walt Johnson in the area of Emergency and Essential Surgery at the World Health Organization.


She previously completed her MD at Baylor College of Medicine, and has been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society, and the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She directed the first two Houston Global Health Collaborative (HGHC) annual conferences and is currently a member of the HGHC Board of Directors.

Nick Boyd, MBChB, FRCA


Dr. Nick Boyd is a consultant in paediatric anaesthesia in Bristol and has a strong interest in global health and anaesthesia safety. Towards the end of his training, he spent six months working as an anaesthetist in a rural hospital in Uganda, working with Lifebox on the pulse oximeters, and implementing the WHO surgical safety checklist in these low-resource environments. He is currently doing a Masters in Global Surgery at Kings College London.


Nick is involved in education and training and is a leading member of the Safer Anaesthesia From Education (SAFE) Paediatric course created for anaesthetic providers in low-resource settings. He has run courses in Uganda and Malawi as well as Training of the Trainer courses in the UK. He was previously the editor for Anaesthesia Tutorial of the Week, a free online educational resource run by the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA). He recently completed a research project in innovation for Lifebox funded by the Gates Foundation to develop a paediatric pulse oximetry probe for low resource settings.

William Bolton, MBChB, BSc (Hons)


Dr. Bolton is a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Fellow in the Global Health Research Group Surgical Technologies in Leeds, UK, taking time out of surgical training to complete a PhD exploring surgical technologies for application in low and middle-income countries.


His research interests include the development and evaluation of novel surgical technology, its applications to low-resource settings and clinical trial design in Global Surgery. In his current role he works closely with the Leeds Royal College of Surgeons of England Surgical Trials Centre, NIHR Surgical MedTech Cooperative, the Leeds Innovation in Surgical Technologies Network, and the Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development. His clinical interests include essential and emergency surgery, general surgery, trauma and orthopaedic surgery, plastic and reconstructive surgery, extreme medicine and emergency medicine.


He is a board member of the NIHR Surgical MedTech Cooperative where he is Trainee Director of the student and trainee-led affiliated group, the Healthcare Technologies Cooperative Foundation. He is also a steering committee member of the Yorkshire Surgical Research Collaborative and a board member of the University Of Leeds School Of Medicine MBChB Enterprise Programme.

Dominique Vervoort


Dominique Vervoort is a final year medical student at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and Co-Chair of InciSioN. He has given talks on Global Surgery and related topics in countries as diverse as Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Tanzania, the UK, and the USA, and helped establish and lectured at the first Global Surgery university course in Germany. Moreover, Dominique represented students and residents in Global Surgery around the world on high-level forums as the World Health Assembly and the UHC Forum. As such, he is keen to learn from and help guide his (future) colleague global surgeons, anaesthesiologists and obstetricians all around the world.


Dominique conducted research on the surgical supply chain in district hospitals across Ghana and was part of the surgical data collection team for the World Development Indicators for the World Bank. As an aspiring paediatric cardiac surgeon, Dominique wrote his master thesis on Global Cardiac Surgery, creating the first systematic review mapping the global state of access to cardiac surgery. Currently, Dominique is set to join the Leuven Institute on Health Policy to end his medical studies in Belgium, mapping the cost of poor surgical quality in the Belgian health system. After graduating this year, Dominique intends to devote some years to research and policy work in Global Surgery, before starting his residency in cardiothoracic surgery.

Basem Mohamed, MB BCh, M.Sc, M.A


Basem Mohamed is a Consultant at the Health Workforce Department, at the World Health Organization (WHO). Basem is currently leading the establishment of the Youth Hub at the Global Health Workforce Network hosted by WHO that aims at connecting global young leaders and change agents from across and beyond health and social care to support the global efforts to transform and expand the Health and social workforce. Basem supported organizing the first ever WHO Youth Forum on Human resources for Health (HRH) at the Fourth Global Forum on HRH that culminated in the Youth Call for Action.


Prior to his role at WHO, Basem established a Program on youth engagement in Global Health Diplomacy at the Ministry of Health of Egypt, where he joined as a youth delegate to the governing bodies of WHO for 3 years, promoting youths at the table of global health policy making. As a researcher with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 2013 -2014, Basem supported research to understand impact of environment and other determinants on Global Health. Basem’s passion lies in the intersection between Health beyond medicine and International Affairs.


Mina Lahlal, MD, Mag.a


Dr. Lahlal studied Medicine and International Development in Vienna, Austria. She completed her graduation dissertation on Emergency Medicine in Europe at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva. Her further endeavors led her to the border region of Myanmar and Sierra Leone, now working with the German Society of Tropical Surgery (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Tropenchirurgie). Besides emergency medicine and orthopaedic surgery, Mina's surgical interests lie within gender equity in the field of surgery as a true advocate for Women in Surgery.


When she is not out and about climbing in the mountains, she is training as a trauma surgeon, with a focus on tropical surgery as a specialty in its own.


Yener Valle, M.D.


Dr. Yener Valle is a general physician from Nicaragua, graduated from the Autonomous National University of Nicaragua (UNAN-Managua). Dr. Valle did his Social Service along the northern Caribbean coast in 2015 knowing the real lack of access to health services in his country, and immediately began his work as a health provider in rural communities consulting at no cost and implementing strategies developed by the government. He was Primary Care Subdirector in the district hospital in Siuna Municipality, where he gained wide experiences applying family and community health models and intercultural health models, and did community work training high school students in first aid and women on midwife skills.


In 2017, Yener became regional coordinator of Operation Smile, the world's largest surgical NGO providing cleft lip and palate repair surgeries in developing countries. In Nicaragua, he coordinates "Cirugía Para El Pueblo" (Surgery for the People), a national surgical upscaling program between the Ministry of Health in Nicaragua and Operation Smile. As such, Yener is passionate about filling the existing gaps in universal access to surgical care.


Sara Venturini, BSc (Hons)


Sara is a final year medical student at the University of Leicester, UK. She is the Coordinator of the UK Global Surgery National Working Group, affiliated with InciSioN and Students for Global Health, and has been a member of the InciSioN Research Sub-team since 2017. Sara is passionate about research and advocacy in global surgery; she completed an evaluation project assessing the impact of the surgical equipment donation programme organised by the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, and was part of the InciSioN team collecting data on the six surgical indicators featuring in the World Development Indicators. She is completing her final year medical elective working with the Cambodia Neurosurgical Support Project team in Phnom Penh.


Sara is keen for medical students to learn more about global surgery, develop skills and feel empowered to take an active role in this field, and she has delivered many talks and workshops on the role medical students can have in global surgery. Sara intends to pursue a career in neurosurgery and continue to be involved in academic global surgery.


Hanna Kaade, M.D.


Dr. Kaade is a Syrian doctor and General Surgery resident in Germany. Dr. Kaade moved to Germany in July 2016 to pursue the continuation of his residency; he had previously completed the first two years of his residency in Aleppo, Syria. Dr. Kaade has volunteered with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent for more than 10 years (National First Aid Committee Member, First Aid and Clinics Coordinator) and worked with the World Health Organization as a Public Health Officer in Syria from 2013 to 2016. He is now a member in the Community of Action for Ambulance Services in Risk Situations (HCiD Project).


Dr. Kaade has a passion for humanitarian work and its impact on health systems. Based on his experiences in surgery and public health, Dr. Kaade is very interested in advancing the mandate of Global Surgery, which led him to co-found the German Global Surgery Alliance (GGSA) in 2017.


Zineb Bentounsi, M.D.


Zineb Bentounsi is a graduating physician from Casablanca, Morocco, and Co-Chair of InciSioN. Zineb is founder and former Chair of the Global Surgery National Working Group within IFMSA Morocco. She is passionate about continuing to raise the voice for gender and overall equity in surgery around the world.


Zineb's main fields of expertise are Human Resources for Health and Advocacy in Global Surgery, for which she has been an IFMSA delegate at the World Health Assembly and started out as Advocacy Lead within InciSioN and coordinated the initial work of InciSioN's Global Surgery Day, respectively. After this academic year, Zineb intends to pursue a Masters in Public Health to deepen her knowledge and passion for public and global health.