KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

    DR RON MAIER

Dr Maier is the Jane and Donald D. Trunkey Professor of Trauma Surgery and Vice Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Washington. He is also Surgeon-in-Chief and Director of the Regional Trauma Center at Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, the Level I Trauma Center for four Northwest states representing one quarter of the landmass of the United States.  Dr Maier obtained a BS magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and, subsequently, an MD degree from Duke University Medical School.  Following his General Surgery residency training at the University of Washington, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Immunopathology at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California.  He has been a member of the Faculty of the Department of Surgery at the University of Washington since 1981.  Throughout his career, he has been interested in the critically ill surgical patient and the underlying pathophysiology driving the aberrant host immuno-inflammatory response and subsequent clinical syndrome of multiple organ failure with its attendant high morbidity and mortality.  Dr Maier has been funded continuously by the NIH since 1981 and has been a member and Chair of the NIH Surgery, Anesthesiology and Trauma Study Section.  He is past-President of the Society of University Surgeons, Shock Society, American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, Surgical Infection Society, North American Trauma Association, and the International Association for the Surgery of Trauma and Surgical Intensive Care.  He is a past Director and Chair of the American Board of Surgery.  He has also been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1994.  He was the co-founder and has been heavily involved with the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, one of the original CDC-funded Injury Centers in America.  His long-standing interest in trauma has involved extensive clinical studies of acute management of the severely injured and critically ill patient.   He has also conducted an extensive number of studies, investigating the impact of trauma system development on improvement in trauma care and outcomes of the severely injured.

    DR ANDREW KIRKPATRICK

Dr. Kirkpatrick is a Professor in both the Departments of Surgery and Critical Care Medicine at the Foothills Medical Centre of the University of Calgary,and is Medical Director of Regional Trauma Services.

Dr. Kirkpatrick graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Ottawa, with fellowships in Surgery and Critical Care at the University of Toronto with a Master’s degree in Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick has more than 160 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, mainly concerning intra-abdominal hypertension, emergency sonography, hypothermia, aerospace medicine and occult pneumothoraces.  He is the outgoing President of the Trauma Association of Canada, an executive member of the Canadian Emergency Ultrasound Society, the World Society of the Abdominal Compartment Syndrome, the World International Network Focused on Critical Ultrasound, and a member of the Canadian Asociation of General Surgeons Evidence Based Reviews in Surgery Committees among other duties.  He retains a reserve commision in the Canadian Forces and has served oversees on several occasions.  He is a former Paratrooper and Flight Surgeon and  currently maintains a current  pilots license.

   A/PROF KATE CURTIS

Associate Professor Kate Curtis has an Emergency Nursing background and is a Trauma Coordinator at St George Hospital Sydney.  Kate has post graduate qualifications in Critical Care Nursing, and a PhD, investigating the impact of the trauma case manager on patient outcomes. She has a fractional appointment at the Sydney Nursing School at the University of Sydney where she is a post doctoral fellow in trauma care, is a senior visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales Injury Risk Management Centre and the George Institute for International Health. Kate also works casually as an RN in Wollongong Emergency Department, is an EMST coordinator and on the Editorial Board of the Australasian Journal of Emergency Nursing. Kate has a passion for Emergency and Trauma Nursing and her research aims to improve clinical and system outcomes by exploring trauma models of care, trauma nursing and financial aspects of trauma systems.