Dr Alik Farber is the Associate Chief Medical Officer for Surgical Services, Vice-Chair of the Department of Surgery and Chief of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at Boston Medical Center.  He is a Professor of Surgery and Radiology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

Dr Farber is a graduate of Brown University and obtained his medical degree from Harvard Medical School.  He completed a residency in general surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a vascular surgery fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and an endovascular surgery fellowship at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He received his Master of Business Administration from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

Dr Farber’s clinical and research interest is in the treatment of peripheral artery disease.  He is a National Principal Investigator of the landmark National Institutes of Health-sponsored Best Endovascular versus Best Surgical Therapy in Patients with Critical Limb Ischemia (BEST-CLI) trial, a multicenter, multispecialty, pragmatic, randomized, controlled trial recently completed at 150 sites across North America, Europe and New Zealand.  He is Chair of the BEST-CLI Publications Committee, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation to oversee the analysis and dissemination of clinical research from the BEST-CLI dataset, with over 30 manuscripts currently in process.  As part of the International BEST-CLI Collaborative he and 25 leading vascular specialists from across the world are building on the BEST CLI evidence base to accelerate global patient-oriented solutions to peripheral artery disease and chart a course to answer the most pressing research questions in this field.

Dr Farber is the Treasurer of both the Massachusetts Chapter of the American College of Surgeons and the New England Society for Vascular Surgery.  He is also the Secretary of the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery.  Dr. Farber has authored 264 peer reviewed manuscripts, 29 book chapters and has edited 2 textbooks.  He has given more than 150 presentations in over 20 countries.

Boonprasit Kritpracha, MD serves as chief of Vascular Surgery unit, at the Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University (PSU) in Thailand. After completing his vascular surgery training at the Jobst Vascular Center, Toledo, Ohio, USA, Dr. Kritpracha founded the vascular surgery service at Songklanagarind hospital, university hospital under PSU, in 2004, the first of such service in southern Thailand. 

He is one of the pioneers in aortic endografting procedure in Thailand and Southeast Asia. His interests include endovascular therapy in difficult aortic pathologies common in Asian populations such as infected aortic aneurysm; hostile neck particularly severe angulation, juxtarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm, thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms and aortic dissections. PSU vascular team is one of the largest experience vascular institutes in the region using branched aortic stent grafts including off-the-shelf, customised, and physician modified aortic stent grafts. He also has been involved in multiple international research in area of endovascular therapy. 

Kevin Mani, MD PhD is Professor of Vascular Surgery at Uppsala university and Chief of Division of Vascular Surgery at Uppsala university hospital, Sweden. He is founder and director of the Uppsala Aortic Fellowship programme. His clinical expertise includes surgical treatment of aortic disease, including complex endovascular repair of aneurysm and dissection in the aortic arch and the thoracoabdominal aorta. Kevin leads a research group focusing on pathophysiology, prevention and treatment of aortic disease, and has performed several national and international registry-based studies on surgical management of aortic aneurysms and dissections and served as principal investigator for randomised clinical trials evaluating the possibility for medical and surgical treatment of aortic disease. He is the past chair of the International Consortium of Vascular Registries, and the Vascunet registry collaboration. He serves as associate editor of the European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery, chair of the Swedish vascular registry, member of the board of the research education council at Uppsala University Faculty of Medicine, and the Swedish Surgical Society’s committee for clinical research.

Apostolos K. Tassiopoulos, MD, FACS is a Professor of Surgery at Stony Brook University and currently serves as the Chairman of the Department of Surgery and the Chief of the Vascular and Endovascular Surgery Division. Dr Tassiopoulos graduated from Aristotle University Medical School in Thessaloniki, Greece, and trained in General Surgery at SUNY Upstate Medical University and in Vascular Surgery (Fellowship) at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois.  After starting as faculty in Surgery at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, Dr Tassiopoulos joined the Surgery department at Stony Brook in 2006, becoming Chief of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery in 2008.  In addition to growing the scope, services, and footprint of the Vascular Surgery Division in the intervening 14 years, Dr. Tassiopoulos also served as Program Director of both the Vascular Surgery Fellowship and Integrated Residency at Stony Brook University Hospital. Since April 2021 he has served as the Chairman in the Department of Surgery.

A practicing academic vascular surgeon, he has served as the Medical Director for the Greater New York Vascular Study Group for over a decade. He managed the SBUH NSQIP (National Surgical Quality Improvement Program) efforts and advanced the science of vascular surgery with understanding of artificial intelligence applications in vascular surgery, aortic endograft failures, aortic neck dilatation, vascular graft patency, coagulation, wound healing, and most recently of thrombosis complications linked to COVID-19 infection. 

 

A career long educator, Dr Tassiopoulos completed a fellowship in medical education at Stony Brook and developed the Surgical Skills Simulation Center at Stony Brook in 2009. He has trained many medical students, residents and fellows in Vascular and Endovascular Surgery. He served as the President of the New York Society for Vascular Surgery between 2018 and 2019 and is still a member of the executive committee of that organization. He has been a member of the Executive Council of the Eastern Vascular Society for the past 5 years.

Associate Professor. Dr Kak Khee Yeung, is a Vascular Surgeon and the Research Director and Principal Investigator in Vascular Surgery at Amsterdam UMC, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 

She is part of the ESVS Academy and the ESVS PAD pathway lead.

She is the Chief editor of the Journal of Endovascular Therapy.

She is specialized in complex aortic aneurysm treatment and has developed an international aortic surgery program in Amsterdam UMC.

Her research lines are focused on personalized diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases for which she has set up an international dataplatform and biobank for over 18 years. Her topics include:

1. Aortic aneurysms: the pathophysiology, proteomics, genomics, imaging and updates in treatment (Biobanking, Artificial intelligence)

2. Peripheral arterial diseases: advanced diagnosis and treatment (artificial intelligence, microbubbles and nanomedicine techniques).

Recently, she is awarded with an Horizon Europe grant from the European Commission for her VASCUL-AID project (www.vascul-aid.eu). This project focuses on using AI to predict cardiovascular disease progression in patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms or peripheral arterial diseases.

Sara L. Zettervall MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at University of Washington School of Medicine.  She completed her General Surgery training at George Washington University in Washington, DC followed by Fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a Harvard teaching hospital. In addition, Dr Zettervall completed a 2-year research Fellowship at Harvard as part of the National Institute of Health Harvard-Longwood T32 Program. 

Dr Zettervall has a clinical practice and research focus in complex aortic disease and is an investigator in multiple physician-sponsored investigational device exemption studies for the endovascular treatment of thoracoabdominal, juxtarenal, and aortic arch disease.