Dr Alana Flexman is an anesthesiologist at St. Paul’s Hospital/Providence Health Care; a Clinical Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics; and an affiliated scientist with the Centre for Advancing Health Outcomes at St. Paul’s Hospital.

After finishing anaesthesia residency at UBC, she completed a fellowship in neuroanaesthesia at the University of California, San Francisco. More recently, she completed a Master of Business Administration in Health Care at the University of Toronto. Dr Flexman is a past-president of the Society for Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care, and the editor of the Journal for Neurosurgical Anesthesiology.

Dr Flexman’s interests include perioperative stroke and brain health, equity in medicine, and health systems research.

Eugenie Kayak, FANZCA, MBBS, MSc, MPH (health economics) is the Enterprise Professor in Sustainable Healthcare at the Melbourne Medical School and consultant anaesthetist in public and private practice.

Professor Kayak has worked with Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA), ANZCA, the AMA, government and the wider medical profession for over a decade, to raise awareness of, influence policy and address the health impacts of climate change and environmental degradation – including healthcare’s own impact.

She was a member of the Chief Medical Officer Advisory Group for Australia’s National Health and Climate Strategy, is Deputy Director of The University of Melbourne Climate CATCH (Collaborative Action for Transformative Change in Health and Healthcare) Lab, Co-Convenor of Sustainable Healthcare for DEA and Deputy Chair of ANZCA’s Environmental Sustainability Network.

Work with the AMA has resulted in a collaboration calling for the Australian healthcare sector to be net zero carbon emissions by 2040 and engagement of Australia’s medical colleges to advocate for action from government and the health sector.

Dr Lachlan Mclver is a rural generalist anaesthetist and public health physician from Millaa Millaa in Far North Queensland. He is a proud alumnus of Cairns Hospital Anaesthetics Department, having completed his JCCA there in 2009 and returned for numerous upskilling stints since then. Lachlan did his PhD on the health impacts of climate change in Pacific Island countries while working for the World Health Organization and is currently based in Switzerland, where he is the Tropical Diseases & Planetary Health Advisor at the Geneva headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). He is an adjunct Associate Professor at James Cook University and co-founder of the international health non-profit organisation Rocketship Pacific.

Lachlan’s clinical work includes locuming as an SMO in rural hospitals around northern Qld and providing rural emergency telemedicine and retrieval coordination services in western NSW. He is particularly interested in environmental health and the provision of acute care in low-resource settings. Lachlan’s first book, Life & Death Decisions – part rollicking medical memoir, part call to arms for action on some of the greatest but most neglected global health crises of our time – was published in 2022 and is a national bestseller. Former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, described it as ‘Just brilliant… The book of the decade.’

Dr Chris Connor is the Vice Chair for Research ad interim for the Department of Anesthesiology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and a practicing anesthesiologist with a particular interest in neuroanesthesia. He completed his MD/PhD at MIT and Harvard Medical School, specialising in biomedical engineering and biomedical physics. His PhD dealt with focusing high intensity ultrasound through the intact skull to ablate brain tumours non-invasively; a technology first used clinically at Brigham & Women’s Hospital for nonsurgical treatment of uterine fibroids and now used today to treat movement disorders by noninvasive pallidotomy.

Dr Connor received his first NIH R01 award in September 2017 and recently has been awarded a five-year R35 Maximizing Investigator Research Award. His main research focus is on the most longstanding anaesthesia question of them all: the mechanism of action of the volatile anaesthetics in suspending consciousness. To this end, he induces anaesthesia in C. elegans and records their neuronal function using genetically modified fluorescent markers. A renowned technologist, he has recently published a controversial sequence of papers exposing the inner workings of the BIS monitor.

Professor Nadine Attal is the Professor of Pain Medicine and Therapeutics and Associate Director of the INSERM U 987 research unit headed by Didier Bouhassira. Professor Attal has played a leading role in translational pain research, including the development with Didier Bouhassira of questionnaires such as the DN4, which are widely used around the world, and the coordination of many therapeutic studies and international guidelines on neuropathic pain.

She has published more than 180 articles in international journals such as Lancet Neurology, Annals of Neurology, Neurology, Brain and Pain (H index: 64). Professor Attal was knighted in 2016 and has received several prestigious scientific prizes and awards.

Dr. Finley is a pediatric anesthesiologist who has worked for over 30 years in pain research and management. He is Professor of Anaesthesia, Pain Management, & Perioperative Medicine at Dalhousie University, and is cross-appointed as Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience. He also holds the inaugural Dr. Stewart Wenning Chair in Pediatric Pain Management at IWK Health in Halifax and is Director of the Centre for Pediatric Pain Research. Dr Finley has published more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals and has lectured widely, with 330 invited presentations on six continents.

He started the PEDIATRIC-PAIN e-mail discussion list in 1993, bringing together pain researchers and clinicians from over 40 countries. His own research and educational projects have taken him to Jordan, Thailand, China, Brazil, and elsewhere. His main interest is pain service development and advocacy for improved pain care for children around the world. To facilitate that, he is co-founder and Board member of the ChildKind International Initiative. Dr Finley was also a member of the Canadian Health Standards Organization Pediatric Pain Management Working Group, that developed the first ever national hospital standard for children’s pain care in 2023.

His current research includes broad collaborations with Canadian colleagues at Dalhousie University and the Universities of Ottawa, Calgary, and Manitoba. He has been a co-I of the CIHR SPOR Chronic Pain Network and is currently part of the European IN-ChildPain Network.

In 2016, Dr Finley was elected to the Executive of the International Association for the Study of Pain as Treasurer and has recently served as Councillor, an exciting opportunity to be part of the promotion of pain science and pain care around the world. In that role he serves as co-Chair of the Global Advocacy Working Group.