Invited Speakers
Steven
E Wolf, M.D.
Professor
Director, US Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, TX UTHSCSA
Betty and Bob Kelso Distinguished Chair in Burn and Trauma Surgery
Dr. Wolf is Director of the Burn Center at Brooke Army Medical Center, the first civilian medical director of this world-renowned burn center. He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch/Galveston in 1990 and completed his residency training at the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1995. He completed a research fellowship in trauma and burns as well as a clinical fellowship, both of these at Shriners Hospital for Children/UTMB. His research interests involve the effect of injury on nutrition and muscle metabolism and the prevention and treatment of burn scarring.
Selected articles on PubMed:
Professor
Palmer Q. Bessey, MD, MS, FACS
Professor of Surgery, Associate Director, William Randolph Hearst Burn Centre, NY
Dr. Bessey is Professor of Surgery and Associate Director of the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center at the Weill Cornell Medical Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
He grew up in New Jersey, attended public schools, and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, officially majoring in Chemistry but spending his time in the Theatre. He attended the College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, where he developed an interest in caring for sick people and first encountered a burn patient, as well as a Stryker frame. He has also earned masters degrees from the University of Oregon (Chemistry) and recently from Columbia University (Epidemiology). He completed a surgical internship and residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and while there, began regular participation in the care of critically ill burn patients. After a research fellowship in metabolism and nutrition at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, he returned to Alabama on the faculty.
He has been a bit of an academic vagabond and also served on the surgical faculties of Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Rochester, before moving to New York City in 2000. Dr. Bessey's current interests include the use of large, health care data bases to assess outcomes and to improve systems of care for injured patients. He works closely with the National Burn Repository of the American Burn Association. Though he never intended to be a burn surgeon, he came to enjoy the holistic and comprehensive nature of burn care, and he also realized what a privilege it was to be a part of a burn team. The commitment, passion, and love, which the nurses, therapists, dietitians, social workers, and technicians bring to their patient is unparalleled in Medicine.
Selected articles on PubMed:
Dr Gretchen J. Summer, RN
Associate Director, Nursing Research Program, Department of Patient Care Services, Kaiser Permanente Northern California Regional Division, Oakland, California.
Dr. Summer received her BS (nursing) from the
After returning to UCSF, she established herself in the laboratory of Dr. Jon Levine, an internationally recognized scientist in the field of peripheral pain mechanisms. As part of this effort, she collaborated with Dr. Linda Sorkin at UC, San Diego, to develop a burn-injury pain model; a model which she further developed, in part with the help of Dr. Levine, into the first partial-thickness burn injury that mimics the wide variability in the intensity of burn pain over the time course observed clinically; an accomplishment that makes it possible to study the mechanisms of burn pain and to target specific molecules that contribute to acute and chronic burn pain as well as to test for the effect of therapeutic agents on burn pain over time. She used this model in collaboration with Dr. Levine to evaluate mechanisms in pain sensory neurons that mediate burn pain.
Dr. Summer also developed a collaboration with Dr. James Eisenach at
Selected articles on PubMed:
Mr Dale Edgar
McComb Clinical Researcher
Senior Physiotherapist, Royal Perth Hospital
A senior physiotherapist and researcher for over 14 years, the
past 11 have been devoted to burn survivor rehabilitation in a number of
Australian burn units. Education and observational visits around the
world have given Dale an insight into the issues of both developing and
established burn services.
Dale lectures at the Curtin University of Technology,
University of Notre Dame and the
Currently engaged in his own clinical doctorate project examining the management of acute burn swelling, Dale is focused on bringing high quality science to the bedside and the honest dissipation of results through publication.