Donal Buggy is Professor of Anaesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine and Consultant in Anaesthesiology at Mater University Hospital, University College Dublin. He was elected for a 2nd term as Council Member of the College of Anaesthesiology of Ireland, having served as Editorial Board Member of BJA 2009-21. He is currently Chair of the European Society of Anaesthesiology & Intensive Care (ESA-IC) Onco-Anaesthesiology Research Group, and Principal Investigator of the ESA-IC research network’s prospective observational study on diabetes, MOPED, which is currently enrolling patients. In June, he will be awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (DSc), the highest doctorate of National University of Ireland, for his career’s published work as clinician scientist on the influence of perioperative interventions on postoperative patient outcomes.
Structure Category: Major Regional Directors
Prof. Barak Cohen graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s medical school in 2003, and served as a medical officer in the IDF until 2015. He concomitantly completed his residency in the division of anesthesia, intensive care, and pain medicine in the Tel-Aviv Medical Center. During his residency and service, he gained experience in clinical work, pre-hospital care, and national preparedness to mass-casualty events. In 2016, he started a 3-year clinical research fellowship in the Cleveland Clinic’s Outcomes Research Department, serving as the department’s chief research fellow.
After his return to Tel-Aviv in 2019, he was nominated as vice chair and head of the research and innovation section in the division of Anesthesia, Intensive Care, and Pain medicine in the Tel-Aviv Medical Center. In this position, prof. Cohen combines clinical work and oversight of clinical research in the largest anesthesia department in Israel.
In 2024, Prof. Cohen was elected as the president of the Israeli Society of Anesthesiologists. He also serves as the chair of Forum 5 (devices and technologies) of the European Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care’s (ESAIC) Scientific Committee, and a member of the Outcomes Research Consortium.
Prof. Cohen’s main areas of interest include continuous postoperative monitoring, postoperative delirium, patient-centered peri-operative outcomes, and innovation and technologies in peri-operative care.
Dr. Devereaux obtained his MD from McMaster University. After medical school he completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Calgary and a residency in cardiology at Dalhousie University. He then completed a PhD in Clinical Epidemiology at McMaster University. Dr. Devereaux is a cardiologist, perioperative care physician, and clinical epidemiologist. He is the Director of the Division of Perioperative Care at McMaster University. He is a Senior Scientist and the Scientific Leader of the Anesthesiology, Perioperative Medicine, and Surgical Research Group at the Population Health Research Institute. Dr. Devereaux is a full Professor in the Departments of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact (HEI) and Medicine at McMaster University. He is the President of the Society of Perioperative Research and Care. Dr. Devereaux has published >390 peer reviewed papers and >85 book chapters, editorials, and commentaries. Dr. Devereaux has an h-index of 108 and 266,260 citations. He has given >1000 lectures and research presentations in 41 countries. Dr. Devereaux’s research program focuses on medical complications during and after surgery. Dr. Devereaux is supported by the McMaster University / Hamilton Health Sciences Chair in Perioperative Care. Dr. Devereaux holds a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair in Perioperative Medicine.
Dr. Ashish Khanna is professor of anesthesiology and vice-chair of research with the department of anesthesiology, section on critical care medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC. He is also a member of the Wake Center for Artificial Intelligence Research, Center for Healthcare Innovation, and the Wake Forest Hypertension and Vascular Research Cardiovascular Science Center. He serves as the inaugural director for the Perioperative Outcomes and Informatics Collaborative (POIC) a large perioperative and critical care outcomes collaborative research program that is staffed with several research nurses, fellows, technicians, students, data scientists and administrative staff and is a center of excellence for clinical trials across specialties.
His research interests include prediction of post-operative respiratory and cardiac events on the regular nursing floor using wearable monitoring, use of large datasets for perioperative outcomes research, effects of hypotension in critically ill patients and use of novel vasopressors in shock states in the ICU. Dr. Khanna has more than 200 peer reviewed papers, two dozen book chapters, editorials, invited non-peer reviewed articles, and has been invited to talk about this work at prestigious national and international forums. He is heavily engaged with the Society of Critical Care Medicine and currently chairs the Discovery research network, was program co-chair for the 2023 congress and Discovery liaison to the 2024 congress and will serve on the SCCM council from 2025 onwards. He chairs the ASA committee on critical care medicine, and on the board of directors for the Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists (SOCCA) and the American Society for Enhanced Recovery and Perioperative Medicine (ASER-PM). He has been awarded funding by FAER, NIH/NCATS KL2, NIH/NHLBI, Wake Forest intramural CTSI and several industry and foundation grants.
The focus of Dr. Ilfeld’s career since completing residency in 2000 has been clinical research, specifically in designing, implementing, leading, and executing multicenter clinical trials. Following his fellowship in regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine, he completed an NIH K30-funded Master of Science degree in Clinical Investigation. A subsequent 5-year NIH K23 Mentored Career Development Award was designed specifically towards multicenter clinical investigations.
Dr. Ilfeld has been the Chief of Research for his division since joining the faculty at the University of California San Diego in 2006. He dedicates 80-100% of my time to conducting clinical research and has published more than 70 randomized trials (16 multicenter), has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, including 10 major reviews and 38 book chapters. Most involved novel, non-opioid analgesic techniques to treat both acute and chronic pain. Most of Dr. Ilfeld’s articles were published in three of the highest-impact anesthesiology journals and have been cited more than 13,000 times (h-index 69; i10-index 162).
Dr. Ilfeld has been the Principal Investigator of 7 multicenter clinical trials funded by the NIH and Department of Defense’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program. All involve the treatment of acute and chronic pain with non-opioid regional analgesic techniques. Combined with additional industry-sponsored and institution-funded randomized studies, he spends 100% of his time conducting clinical trials as principal investigator for all. Dr. Ilfeld’s career funding exceeds $30 million. Current topics of research include continuous peripheral nerve blocks, liposomal bupivacaine, suzetrigine, percutaneous cryoneurolysis, percutaneous peripheral nerve stimulation, pulsed shortwave therapy, and auricular neuromodulation.
Dr. Royse is a Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Melbourne, and a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. His research interests include cardiac surgery outcomes, postoperative quality of recovery, echocardiography and clinical ultrasound. He is a founder of the Postoperative Quality of Recovery Scale (PostopQRS). He has published over 230 peer-reviewed papers and holds multiple research grants for large-scale clinical trials, with a focus on POCUS interventions and Cardiac Surgery outcomes. He has a strong educational interest, specializing in eLearning, and is currently the Co-Director of Mobile Learning Unit at the University of Melbourne. He is an associate Editor for the Journal of Clinical Anesthesiology.
Bernd Saugel is Professor of Anesthesiology and Vice Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology in the Center of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (Hamburg, Germany).
He is a board-certified specialist in anesthesiology, intensive care medicine, and internal medicine and holds a European Diploma in Intensive Care Medicine. His main research area is the hemodynamic management of high-risk patients having surgery and of critically ill patients. He especially focuses on concepts of “personalized hemodynamic management” to improve patient-centered outcomes in perioperative and intensive care medicine. Prof. Saugel has published numerous original articles and didactic reviews in peer-reviewed journals. He is Editor of the British Journal of Anaesthesia
Professor of Anesthesiology in the Department of Anesthesiology at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, TX and Director of Pediatric Clinical Research in the Division of Pediatric Anesthesia at Children’s Medical Center, Dallas, TX. More than 140 full papers. He participates in large collaborative research studies, such as the GAS study, in which 24 centers from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zeeland worked together in the only prospective randomized trial dedicated to the role of general anesthetics in neurodevelopment of young patients. Part of this study was NIH sponsored and resulted in multiple publications, including two in 2016 and 2019 in Lancet. He was the leader of the follow-up pilot study, the TREX study, with most of the same group. Dr. Szmuk is a founder of two multicenter registry studies: The Pediatric Difficult Intubation Registry (PDiR) and the Pediatric Craniofacial Collaborative Group (PCCG), each of which has improved our understanding and management.
