Professor Karen B Domino is Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle. Professor Domino’s research focuses on patient safety, quality of care, and shared decision-making. She is Director of the Anesthesia Closed Claims Project and Registries, which analyses anesthesia-related patient injuries to develop strategies to improve patient safety.
Professor Domino is active within the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), having served as Chair of the Committee on Professional Liability from 2002-2012, Annual Meeting Oversight Executive Committee from 2011-2016, and as a member of several other committees. Professor Domino was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow based at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC in 2012-13. In 2014, Professor Domino became the 53rd Emery A Rovenstine Lecturer at the ASA Annual Meeting. Her lecture entitled “Healthcare at the Crossroads: the Imperative for Change”, described the financial pressures in healthcare and why disruptive innovation in medical care is needed to meet the challenges of the future.
Professor Oscar de Leon-Casasola is the Senior Vice-Chair, and Professor of Anesthesiology and Medicine at the University at Buffalo, Chief of the Division of Pain Medicine and Professor of Oncology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY.
Professor de Leon-Casasola has authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in major scientifi c journals, and has been a chapter contributor in many books. He has published the books Cancer Pain – Pharmacological, Interventional, and Palliative Care Approaches, Acute Pain Management, Interventional Techniques for the Treatment of Chronic Pain, and The Science of Pain: An Illustrated and Clinically Oriented Guide.
Professor de Leon-Casasola is the immediate past president of the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Management (ASRA). He served as a member in the task force of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) that created the society’s guidelines for the treatment of chronic pain and was the co-chair of the committee drafting the acute pain guidelines for the ASA and the American Pain Society.
Professor Jennifer Weller is head of the Centre for Medical and Health Sciences Education at the University of Auckland, and a specialist anaesthetist at Auckland City Hospital. Professor Weller is on the editorial board of the British Journal of Anaesthesia, and an editor of the new journal BMJ Simulation and Technology. She is widely published in the areas of simulation-based learning, inter-professional teamwork, and patient safety and assessment, and directs a masters program in clinical education.
Professor Weller currently holds the ANZCA Douglas Joseph Professorship, awarded in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the specialty. She is using the associated funding to support her study evaluating a national quality improvement initiative for safer surgery.
Dr Richard P Dutton earned his BA from Harvard University in 1983, his MD from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1987, and an MBA at the University of Maryland in 2001. He completed residency in anesthesiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1991 and then served as an attending anesthesiologist at the National Naval Medical Center, while on active duty in the United States Navy. In 1994, Dr Dutton joined the Faculty at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center of the University of Maryland, where he served as Director of Trauma Anesthesiology and Director of Clinical Operations. Dr Dutton was promoted to the rank of professor in 2009.
In 2009 Dr Dutton was named the first Executive Director of the American Society of Anesthesiologist’s Anesthesia Quality Institute, and launched the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry. In 2015, Dr Dutton left the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) to become the first Chief Quality Officer for United States Anesthesia Partners. Dr Dutton serves on numerous ASA and federal committees working to develop measures for anesthesia performance, perioperative patient experience and new models of healthcare, and continues to practice anesthesiology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
Professor Tor Wager is Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Cognitive Psychology in 2003, and served as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Columbia University from 2004-2009. Since 2010, he has directed Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory. Much of the lab’s work centres on the neurophysiology of pain and emotion and how they are shaped by cognitive and social influences. In particular, Professor Wager is interested in how thoughts and beliefs infl uence affective experiences, affective learning, and brain-body communication. In addition to negative emotions and stressors, the lab also focuses on prosocial emotions, including compassion and empathy.
In addition to basic research, Professor Wager’s lab is involved in developing analysis methods for fMRI. He and his group have developed several publically available software toolboxes. He regularly teaches workshops on fMRI analysis and has co-authored a book on the subject, titled Principles of fMRI. Finally, a third focus is on collaborative, translational research incorporating brain systems level analyses into the study of clinical disorders, including chronic pain, PTSD, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia. More information about the lab’s activities, publications, and software can be found here.
Dr Fiona Kiernan is a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin and a Fellow of the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland. She graduated from University College Dublin (UCD) in 2005, and completed anaesthesia training in Ireland, while her fellowship was in University College Hospital, London.
Along with her medical degree, she also holds a Masters in Health Economics, Policy and Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is studying for a doctorate in economics with the Department of Economics in University College Dublin. She lectures on topics relating to resource allocation and health economics, and has presented internationally on healthcare utilisation and access to healthcare. Her main areas of research are the income-health relationship, performance measurement in hospital settings and behavioural economics.
In 2016 Fiona was appointed to the State Board of the Health Insurance Authority of Ireland, which oversees the health insurance market on behalf of the Minister for Health.
