Professor Hugo Van Aken to Deliver Annual Peter and Eva Safar Lecture on June 23, 2011
Prof. Hugo Van Aken MD, PhD, FRCA will deliver the 31st Peter and Eva Safar Annual Lecture in Medical Sciences and Humanities on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011 at 12PM in room S-100 Starzl Biomedical Science Tower (BST). Dr. Van Aken’s presentation will be entitled “Update on Thoracic Epidural Anesthesia and the Stress Response – Are the Benefits Worth the Trouble and Risks?”
Dr. Van Aken is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive-Care Medicine at the University Hospital in Münster, Germany. After completing his medical studies at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, in 1976, he worked as an assistant in the Department of Anesthesiology there and qualified as a specialist in anesthesiology in Belgium in 1980. He completed his PhD in anesthesiology at the University of Münster, Germany, in 1983. He was chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive-Care Medicine at the Catholic University of Louvain from 1986 to 1995, and was appointed to his present post in Münster in August 1995.
Dr. Van Aken was actively involved in various anesthesiology organizations in Europe for 20 years. As President of the European Academy of Anaesthesiology (EAA), he was the driving force behind the amalgamation of the three different European organizations into the newly formed European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA) in 2005. He left the Board of the ESA in December last year. He was elected as Secretary-General of the German Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive-Care Medicine (DGAI) in 2010.
He is also an honorary member of the Association of University Anesthesiologists (AUA), the Polish Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive-Care Therapy (1992), the Belgian Society for Anesthesia and Resuscitation (2000), the Association of Anesthesiologists of Georgia (2003), the American Society of Anesthesiologists (2003), and the Dutch Association of Anesthetists (2009). In 2009 he was appointed as an ordinary member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (FRCA), a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (FANZCA), and a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).
Dr. Van Aken has published more than 450 articles in journals listed in Current Contents and has contributed many chapters to national and international textbooks, as well as publishing seven books. His major research interests are in regional anesthesia, postoperative pain, cardiac function, intestinal microcirculation, and thrombocyte function. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion in Anesthesiology and Best Practice & Research: Clinical Anaesthesiology. He is also a member of several international editorial boards and scientific societies in the field of anesthesiology.
The Peter and Eva Safar Annual Lectureship in Medical Sciences and Humanities honors the late Peter Safar MD and his wife Eva for their professional and personal contribution to the scientific community. Dr. Safar’s pioneering efforts and accomplishments in emergency medicine, critical care medicine, resuscitation research, and disaster reanimatology have saved countless lives and have gained international recognition. He initiated and served as chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he was Distinguished Professor of Resuscitation Medicine between 1979 and 2003. He founded the University of Pittsburgh’s International Resuscitation Research Center and served as its director for many years. In recognition of Peter Safar’s contributions to the field of resuscitation science, his successor renamed it the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research.
This lectureship, currently hosted by Patrick M. Kochanek, MD, director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research and John P. Williams, MD, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, was initiated in 1980 by Peter M. Winter, MD, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine from 1979 to 1996.
