Professor Carol Hodgson is a clinical trialist with expertise in long-term functional outcomes after critical illness. She is Head of the Division of Clinical Trials and Cohort Studies in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, and Co-Director of the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre, Monash University. She is Chair of the Australian Health Research Alliance and the Executive Director of Monash Partners Research Translation Network, which aims to ensure research is implemented and translated into healthcare to improve patient outcomes. She sits on the Australian NHMRC Research Committee which fosters research across the spectrum of health and medical research, including the awarding of grants and providing research support. She has worked in ICU at Alfred Health for over 25 years as a Specialist Physiotherapist.

Lisa Higgins, PhD, MPH, BPhysio is a clinical trialist, senior research fellow and health economist at the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre (ANZIC-RC), Monash University, where she leads the Health Economics Program. Her research focuses on clinical trial methodology, long-term outcomes, and conducting economic evaluations alongside clinical trials in critical care. Lisa has served as a member of the management committees of more than 25 large-scale national and international randomised controlled trials, and is currently leading an RCT evaluating a post-discharge intervention to improve long-terms outcomes for ECMO survivors. Lisa has more than 140 publications with over 15,000 citations and has multiple clinical trial publications in high impact journals including the NEJM and JAMA.

Evangelos Giamarellos is Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and director of the MSc program of Infectious Diseases at the University of Athens.

His main research contribution is immunomodulation in sepsis and in auto-inflammatory disorders. He has 573 publications in international peer-reviewed journals with more than 42,000 citations and h-index 95. He is the current chairman of the European Sepsis Alliance and the current President of the Hellenic Society of Chemotherapy. His main achievement is the approval of anakinra for COVID-19 pneumonia in adults by the European Medicines Agency and the Food and Drug Administration through the phase 2 and 3 trials SAVE and SAVE-MORE that he designed and conducted.

Michael Reade is Head of the Greater Brisbane Clinical School of the University of Queensland, an intensivist at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and an anaesthetist at Ipswich Hospital. Since 2011 he has been the Professor of Military Medicine and Surgery at the Australian Defence Force’s Joint Health Command. He represents Australia on the NATO Blood Panel, Chairs the military Five Eyes Science and Technology Military Medicine Panel, and is a member of the WHO Medical Civil-Military Technical Working Group. His research programs cover blood and fluid resuscitation in trauma, traumatic brain injury, and the management of acute cognitive dysfunction in critical illness.

Ary Serpa Neto, MD, MSc, PhD is an Intensivist and Director of Intensive Care Research at Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He is also an Associate Professor at the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre (ANZIC-RC), Monash University, where he leads the Mechanical Ventilation and Renal & Metabolic Programs. He is a founding member of the Protective Ventilation Network (PROVENet) and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Brazilian Research in Intensive Care Network (BRICNet). His research focuses on mechanical ventilation, renal and metabolic care, and advanced clinical trial methodology, with a strong emphasis on translating evidence into clinical practice.

Ary has authored over 430 publications, including multiple articles in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, and his work has been cited in several international guidelines. He currently leads several large-scale international randomised clinical trials in Australia, including the NHMRC-funded SODa-BIC, DRIVE and GuARDS trials.

Brenda is a Professor in Physiotherapy at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. She leads research focused on the health and rehabilitation of people after critical Illness and people with respiratory conditions. She has expertise with a range of research methodologies and is involved in several multi-centre research programmes funded (each over £1million) by the NIHR.

Brenda is the lead for the Centre for Health and Rehabilitation Technologies (CHaRT) School of Health Sciences, Ulster University, completing research in collaboration with local hospitals, and national and international colleagues, and she has key roles in Northern Ireland (NI) research infrastructure e.g. Clinical Research Facility (NICRF) Management Group.

She is a member of several professional bodies that support advancing education and research in respiratory health and recovery after critical illness and is an Associate Editor for Physiotherapy Canada. She has successfully supervised PhD students, MSc students, and research staff (> 50) and published widely (h-index 21). Recent achievements include winner of the Advancing Healthcare Awards Northern Ireland: Award for Research and Development (2023) and was recent president of the International Confederation of Cardiorespiratory Physiotherapists (2019-2023), World Physiotherapy.

Danny McAuley is a Consultant and Professor in Intensive Care Medicine at the Regional Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital and Queen’s University of Belfast. He undertook his training in Belfast, Birmingham, London and San Francisco. He is Programme Director for the MRC/NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) programme and Co-Director of Research for the UK Intensive Care Society. He has several research interests including Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome and clinical trials. He is involved in multiple clinical trials, including being an executive team member of the PANTHER trial, a Bayesian adaptive platform randomized clinical trial studying novel interventions to improve outcomes for patients with acute hypoxaemic respiratory failure. 

Twitter: @dfmcauley

Dr Arthur Kwizera is a Ugandan specialist in anaesthesia and intensive care, with advanced training from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a fellowship in critical care interventional pulmonology from Pordenone, Italy. He has been an invited speaker at major international congresses, including the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM), International Fluid Academy (IFAD), and the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM). He is the first African recipient of honorary membership from ESICM, recognising his leadership in advancing critical care in low- and middle-income countries.

He is the founder and president of the Intensive Care Society of Uganda and a foundation fellow of the College of Anaesthesiologists of East, Central, and Southern Africa (CANECSA). He serves on global expert panels for the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC), the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA), and, in the past, the USAID Technical Advisory Group on oxygen therapy.

Sander Rozemeijer is an anesthesiology resident at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands. After graduating medical school with honours in 2018, he started his doctoral program in the field of Intensive Care Medicine. His research focusses on the effects of vitamin C in ischemia-reperfusion injury. He coordinated the multicenter VITaCCA-trial, investigating the effect of early high-dose vitamin C in post-cardiac arrest patients.

Dr Angelique de Man is an intensivist at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands. She has extensive experience in clinical and, since she is also a medical biologist, also in translational research. Her domains of expertise in research comprise hyperoxia, cardiac arrest, vitamin C and micronutrients in critical care setting.

She coordinated the O2-ICU trial, investigating low-normal vs high-normal PaO2 target in 400 critically ill patients with SIRS (JAMA 2021). She was coauthor of the micronutrient guidelines (doi: 10.1016/j.clnu.2022.02.015) and is currently leader of the micronutrients working group of the ESICM. Furthermore, she is a member of the ESPEN special interest group for micronutrients. Together with her PhD-student Sander Rozemeijer, she coordinated the VITaCCA trial, an RCT investigating the effect of 2 different doses (3 and 10 g per day) of intravenously administered vitamin C versus placebo in 270 post cardiac arrest patient. Furthermore, she recently received the MSCA-DN grant of the EU for the BIO-MICRO (Biomarkers and Intervention Outcomes in Micronutrient Optimization) project. In this project 13 PhDs in 4 different countries (Netherlands, Germany, Ireland and Italy) will develop new analytics to enable reliably determination of functional micronutrient body status, investigate potential subphenotypes of patients most likely to benefit from micronutrient supplementation and enable guidance with appropriate timing of micronutrient therapy.

Dr. Jonathan Casey is a pulmonary and critical care physician and clinical researcher with a focus on conducting pragmatic comparative effectiveness clinical trials. He is the director of the Coordinating Center for the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group, which has led more than 25 trials, enrolling more 50,000 patients. He has published more than 190 manuscripts, including 20 manuscripts in The New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA, and his research has identified multiple beneficial interventions that have changed care for critically ill patients around the world. 

Dr. Casey also serves as Co-PI of the NCATS-funded Vanderbilt Trial Innovation Center which supports the development and conduct of multi-center trials across the United States. He cares for patients in the Vanderbilt University Medical Intensive Care Unit.

Matthew W. Semler MD, MSc is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Anesthesiology, and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University where he practices as a critical care physician, serves as Associate Director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit, and directs the Center for Learning Healthcare. Dr. Semler co-directs the Pragmatic Critical Care Research Group, a network of emergency medicine, anesthesia, and critical care clinicians and researchers at 25 centers across the US that embeds pragmatic trials into clinical care to determine which treatments produce the best patient outcomes.

Randomized trials he has helped lead, including 15 published in the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA, have identified effective treatments in the fields of fluid management, tracheal intubation, and respiratory support.

Elissa is an Intensivist and clinician researcher. She is a full-time Intensive Care Specialist in the Australian Army through which she works at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. She also holds honorary academic titles at the University of Queensland and Monash University. Her PhD was on the role of the endothelial glycocalyx in severe trauma, and she is building a research program that spans the management of severe burns, trauma, blood transfusion, military medicine, and endothelial dysfunction in critical illness.

She has a strong interest in the design of novel clinical trials and is currently completing a Masters in Biostatistics. She is an emerging leader in critical care clinical trials, currently leading the Australian sites of the international, multi-centre, T4P clinical trial, and is a member of the management committee of several other large multi-centre clinical trials. She is an active member of the ANZICS Clinical Trials Group community and supervises several student research projects. 

Sarah Sasson is a Clinical Immunologist, Immunopathologist, and Group Leader at The Kirby Institute of Infection and Immunity at The University of New South Wales where she leads wet-laboratory research. She has a growing research program in understanding the immunopathogenesis of sepsis/SIRS in the hope of identifying novel therapeutic targets. Sarah has led translational research projects in T-cell biology, Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor toxicities and COVID-19 vaccination in people who are immunocompromised. Sarah is currently funded by the Australian Medical Research Future Fund, a UNSW Scientia Fellowship, The Australian Intensive Care Foundation, and a USA National Institute of Health R21 Grant.

Twitter:  @sarah_sasson