Associate Professor Luregn Schlapbach is current Head of the Department of Intensive Care at the University Children`s Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and has a clinical focus on cardiac intensive care. After having worked during a decade as paediatric intensivist in Australia including being a Staff Specialist in the PICU at Queensland Children`s Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, he maintains an active research program on Sepsis, Infection, and Inflammation in Critically Ill Children at the Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland.

Luregn is Past Chair of the ANZICS Paediatric Study Group and is involved in various ANZICS PSG activities. He has been in the Steering Group of a number of observational and interventional trials in PICU patients and has received funding from NHMRC, MRFF, SNF, and others. Luregn was group head on the Pediatric Surviving Sepsis Campaign; he is Co-Chair of the international Paediatric Sepsis Definition Taskforce, as well as a member of the Global Sepsis Alliance Executive.

Luregn`s research has focused on understanding the impact of sepsis, infection, and inflammation on critically ill children. His research program includes aspects such as epidemiology, biomarkers, interventions, long-term outcomes and genomics in this highly vulnerable patient group. He is interested in improving our understanding of why some children become critically unwell, and in developing better approaches to allow early recognition and targeted treatment of sepsis and life-threatening inflammation. Luregn co-led the NITRIC trial on behalf of the ANZICS Paediatric Study Group since 2017.

Twitter:  @pus27

Paul Checchia, M.D., serves as Medical Director of the Pediatric Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit and Associate Chief of the Section of Critical Care Medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Additionally, he is Professor of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine and Pediatric Cardiology at Baylor College of Medicine. He specializes in critical care of children with heart disease.

Twitter:  @ChecchiaPaul

Professor Kathy Rowan is the Director of the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research Programme, Director of the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC), Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Adjunct Professor (Research) at Monash University, Australia.

In 1994, following her PhD from the University of Oxford, Professor Rowan founded ICNARC, an independent, not-for-profit, scientific organisation to facilitate improvements in the structure, process, outcomes and experiences of critical care - for patients and for those who care for them. ICNARC manages a broad programme of clinical audit and clinical/health services research, nationally and internationally.

Professor Rowan was awarded the Humphry Davy Medal by the UK Royal College of Anaesthetists (2004), completed a Harkness Fellowship (2005), received the President’s Prize with honorary life membership of the UK Intensive Care Society (2019) and Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (Queen’s Birthday Honours’ List 2021) for services to research and intensive care.

Twitter:  @KathyRowan101

Dr. J. Wesley (Wes) Diddle did his pediatrics training at Seattle Children’s Hospital, followed by pediatric cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital and pediatric critical care medicine at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He has since been on faculty at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, where he serves as the Director of Quality and Outcomes for the CICU. He completed the Quality Improvement Leadership Training Program (QuILT) program at Children’s National, and he serves as the local clinical champion for the Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium (PC4) and is a member of the Children’s National Hospital single ventricle team and the National Pediatric Cardiology Quality Improvement Collaborative (NPCQIC).

He has worked at the local and multicenter level on cardiac arrest reduction and prevention, working in multidisciplinary teams to proactively identify patients at high-risk of arrest and mechanical circulatory support; simulating arrest and ECMO scenarios; and utilizing video and telemetry to facilitate post-event debriefings and process improvement. He is a member of the NEPHRON collaborative, a multicenter group studying the impacts of kidney injury and fluid overload on neonatal cardiac surgical outcomes. He recently partnered with PC4 and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals to review real-world use of inhaled nitric oxide following pediatric cardiac surgery, using the PC4 database, and he presented those data at the PC4 Spring Conference in Atlanta in May 2022.