We have some incredible speakers lined up for the 2024 ANZCA ASM and will add to this page as more are confirmed for the program.
Be sure to click on each of the profile images below to find out more about each of the speakers.
Daniel is a Professor of Perioperative and Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Plymouth and Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth (UK). His main research interest is how humans respond to different levels of oxygen, both too much (hyperoxia) and too little (hypoxia) of it.
He has been involved in several research expeditions to high altitude and in 2007 summited Mount Everest with the Xtreme Everest team. On the summit a blood gas taken from him showed one of the lowest oxygenation readings ever recorded in a human! Since then, Daniel has focused on how to translate what he has learnt at high altitude into interventions that may benefit patients.
He is the Chief Investigator of the NIHR-funded UK-ROX trial, evaluating the clinical effectiveness of conservative oxygen therapy in mechanically ventilated patients and the NIHR-funded EXAKT study to assess the accuracy of pulse oximeters in patients with different skin tones. Daniel is also involved in a number of studies evaluating exercise interventions in perioperative and critically ill patients.
Daniel is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Intensive Care Society and a council member of the Intensive Care Society in the UK. In 2015 Daniel was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), for services to the prevention of infectious diseases. This was the result of his work at the Royal Free Hospital in London, caring for patients with Ebola virus disease.
Professor André Van Zundert had been working for three decades at Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, when he was asked – in 2013 – to set up an academic department of anaesthesia at The Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH) in Brisbane, Qld, Australia.
André has professorial appointments at The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology and Queensland Brain Institute.
This collaboration resulted in almost 500 scientific publications, 76 book chapters, and four major textbooks. Professor Van Zundert established at the RBWH a ‘Centre for Excellence and Innovation in Anesthesia’, offering teaching, training, testing equipment, quality care (audits, incident reporting) and research. He supervises teaching and training and is also involved in supervising research. His research focused in the past on pain relief in obstetrics, which resulted in a major textbook ‘Pain Relief and Anesthesia in Obstetrics’; improvements in regional anesthesia (e.g., thoracic segmental spinal anesthesia for the frail patient); and more recently improvements in airway management through visualisation techniques, i.e., videolaryngoscopy and video laryngeal mask airways. For his contributions, André received international recognition and acclaim and was awarded many prizes, awards, and royal distinctions.
Recently, André obtained a special diploma in ‘perioperative geriatric medicine’. Currently, Professor Van Zundert works on reversal agents for general anaesthetics in an attempt to decrease or halt the potential impact of neuro-inflammation on the elderly brain. Research at the Queensland Brain Institute focuses on exploring reversal agents of general anaesthesia on the brains of flies and other small animals, with promising results. ANZCA awarded André the 2023 Lennard Travers Professor of Anaesthesia.
Professor Carolyn Weiniger is the Director of Obstetric Anesthesia in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel. She is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Professor Weiniger serves as Chair of the Patients Forum of the Scientific Committee, and as a Member of the Research Committee, of the European Society of Anaesthesiologists and Intensive Care (ESAIC). She is an Editor of the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia. Professor Weiniger has authored over 100 original research papers, reviews and chapters, mainly related to safe obstetric anaesthesia practices including respiratory depression associated with opioid administration, anaesthesia for external cephalic version and placenta accreta spectrum. She is an editor of the first edition of Principles and Practice of Maternal Critical Care and an editor of the International Journal of Obstetric Anesthesia.
Vivianne Tawfik, MD, PhD is a board-certified Anesthesiologist and Pain Medicine physician who specialises in the treatment of complex chronic pain disorders including chronic post-operative pain, complex regional pain syndrome and peripheral nerve injury. She is currently an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.
After completing her undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, she obtained her MD and PhD in Neuroscience, with a focus on basic pain mechanisms, at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH, USA. She then moved to California to join the Stanford Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine as an anesthesiology resident in the Fellowship in Anesthesia Research and Medicine (FARM) program, of which she now serves as the Director.
After completion of her subspecialty fellowship training in pain medicine, Dr Tawfik joined the faculty at Stanford University and continues to research the immune contribution to persistent pain using clinically-informed basic science while also caring for patients suffering from chronic pain. Her lab uses a variety of approaches, from single cell sequencing to complex behavioural paradigms in mouse pain models, to investigate the contribution of spinal cord glial cells (microglia and astrocytes) to the transition from acute to chronic pain.
She enjoys science, sushi and snowboarding in her free time.
Dr Hance Clarke is the Director of Pain Services and the Pain Research Unit at the Toronto General Hospital (TGH). He is the Knowledge Translation Chair for the University of Toronto Centre for the Study of Pain and an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Toronto.
He has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications and has been invited to speak on pain control, cannabis and the opioid crisis to the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada and elsewhere around the world. In the spring of 2024, he assumes the role of President of the Canadian Pain Society. In 2018, he became the Director of the GoodHope Ehlers Danlos Syndrome Clinic at Toronto General Hospital / University Health Network. The GoodHope EDS Clinic offers a path-breaking interdisciplinary model of care to address historical gaps in the diagnosis and treatment of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and hypermobility spectrum disorders (HSD).
