Professor Shafi Ahmed is a world renowned, multi award winning surgeon, teacher, futurist, innovator and entrepreneur. He is a 3x TEDx speaker and is faculty at Singularity University. He has delivered over 250 keynotes in 30 countries.
He has been dubbed as the Virtual Surgeon.
He studied medicine at Kings College Hospital Medical School London and completed his surgical training in London. He is currently a Laparoscopic Colorectal surgeon specialising in colorectal cancer at The Royal London and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals
His PhD thesis was on colorectal cancer genetics and he has been awarded 5 honorary doctorates for his work on global health and education. He has been awarded the accolade of the most watched surgeon in human history. As a dedicated trainer, educator, and Associate Dean of Bart’s Medical School, he was awarded the Silver Scalpel award in 2015 as the best national trainer in surgery by the Association of Surgeons in Training.
He served as an elected member of council of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 2014 – 2019 where he was the Director of the International Surgical Training Programme.
He is an honorary visiting professor at The University of Bradford where he delivered the Cantor Lecture of Technology in 2017 and the public lecture to open the Digital Health Enterprise Zone. He was awarded a doctorate of health from the University in 2019
In 2017 he was British Bangladeshi of the Year and also the top British Asian star in Tech and received this award from HRH Duke of York. In 2018 he was awarded The Future NHS award by the Members of Parliament.
His mission is to merge the world of medicine, global education, and virtual and augmented reality to democratize and scale surgical education to make it affordable and accessible to everyone using the power of connectivity to allow equitable surgical care.
Shafi made world headline news in 2014 by streaming a live operation using Google Glass to 14,000 students and trainees across 132 countries.
On April 14th, 2016 he performed the world’s first virtual reality operation which was watched by 55,000 people in 140 countries, and reached 4.6 million on Twitter.
In December 2016 he used the Snapchat spectacles to record and teach surgery across the globe which has had over 100 000 downloads and viewed by over 2 million people and reached 54 million people on twitter.
In November 2017 he conducted an operation whilst being joined by other surgeons from three continents and three time zones using avatars and holograms.
He cofounded Medical Realties who released the worlds first VR Interactive Surgical Training Module. He is a non-executive director of Medic Bleep, a communications platform for healthcare professionals. He is an advisor for governments and major blue chip companies working in Pharma, Digital Health, Artificial intelligence, Robotics and Blockchain.
He recently disrupted the traditional medical school curriculum by launching the Barts X Medicine Programme which has embedded future technologies and entrepreneurship into the medical school. He is also chairman and a co-founder of the Global Innovation and New Technologies conference in London and Chair of WEBIT Health, Bulgaria.
