UMAX 2023

Professor Simon Holmes was appointed to the Royal London Hospital in 2003 as the first UK Consultant to a post specialising totally in the management of craniomaxillofacial trauma. His role was to lead and develop a Craniofacial Trauma Team. In the past ten years, Professor Holmes has developed research, training, and service work at the trust, nationally, and internationally. He has introduced several new surgical techniques and digital treatment planning technologies and overseen the integrated approach to facial trauma which has proven both innovative and successful. He has lectured widely nationally and internationally, and has written three major textbooks on craniofacial trauma. He has published in major anatomical textbooks including Gray’s anatomy. He has published widely in the Maxillofacial literature, and is on the editorial review board for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Orbit, Injury, and the International Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. He is an Assistant Editor for British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. He has presented invitational keynote lectures on four continents. His research interests are around assessment of severity of injury with development of assessment of outcome tools. He has developed an iPhone App as a craniofacial skeletal fracture severity score calculator. He is also interested in complex anterior skull base injuries, functional and anatomical orbital reconstruction, and has published definitive papers on these subjects. He is also interested in forensic analysis of facial injuries, as well as developing embedding of facial trauma services in international first aid collaborations. He was appointed to the Chair of Craniofacial Traumatology in 2015. He has developed and chairs a distance learning MSc course in craniofacial trauma at Queen Mary University of London. Politically he is active within his specialty - he was previously the nominated Facial Trauma Lead for British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons, and a Member of AO UK Craniofacial.

Ms Clare Schilling is a Consultant Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon at University College Hospital London and Honorary Associate Professor of the Head and Neck Academic Centre (HNAC) in the division of surgical and interventional sciences at University College London. She completed OMFS specialist training including a Head and Neck fellowship the UK as well as a clinical research PhD in novel imaging techniques for detection of metastasis in head and neck cancer. She holds over £1 million in research funding as Chief Investigator of NIHR funded multicentre trial, “LOOC”, for lymphatic mapping of oropharyngeal cancers. She is co-director of Headstart, the Royal College of Surgeons accredited national training program for sentinel node biopsy in oral cancer. Her research and clinical interests include fluorescence guided surgery, augmented reality surgery and quality outcome measures.

Miss Zarina Shaikh is a 'generalist' maxillofacial surgery surgeon with a specialist interest in skin cancer surgery. She was Co-Founder of the UK Society of Women in Maxillofacial surgery, an international mentor allied to The University of Stanford and also an active campaigner for equity in the NHS. Outside of work, Miss Shaikh is a keen musician, artist and writer.

Miss Ambika Chadha is a specialist in Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery who is the nominated 2022 Training Interface Group (TIG) Fellow in Cleft Lip and Palate. Ambika is based in Addenbrookes Hospital in the Cleft.Net.East cleft service. She is passionate about inspiring the next generation of trainees to super-specialise in Cleft Lip and Palate and about engaging in research. As a busy mother to three daughters, she strongly believes in work-life integration and mentorship. Ambika's passion for cleft has always spanned both clinical and research domains. She is currently writing up her PhD in the applications of 3D surface imaging in cleft for which she was awarded simultaneous research fellowships by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) and its Faculty of Dental Surgery. Miss Chadha was also awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Travel fellowship to spend several months in the 3D Facial Research Imaging Group based in Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is especially interested in the use of 3D and 4D imaging to deep phenotype cleft lip and the application of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (X-AI) to enhance cleft care. Ambika believes that Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies are poised to play an important role in disseminating clinical knowledge in cleft globally.