Keynote Speakers

Professor Martin J. BURTON

Director, Cochrane UK, United Kingdom
Co-Chair, Cochrane Board
Professor of Otolaryngology, Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford
Honorary Consultant Otolaryngologist, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Professor Martin Burton is Director of Cochrane UK, the unit responsible for supporting the activities of Cochrane contributors in the UK and Ireland, and Co-Chair of Cochrane’s international Governing Board. He is Professor of Otolaryngology at the University of Oxford, an Honorary Consultant Otolaryngologist at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, based at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and Fellow in Clinical Medicine at Balliol College Oxford. He is joint Co-ordinating Editor of Cochrane ENT, the group within Cochrane responsible for ear, nose & throat disorders and head & neck cancer, which he helped to establish in 1998.

He trained as a medical student at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and did his early clinical training in Oxford and Bristol. He was a Fulbright Scholar and undertook research training at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan, US. Following a period as Lecturer in Otolaryngology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, he completed his doctoral thesis on the safety of cochlear implantation in small children. His higher surgical training was completed in London and as Fellow in Otology, Neuro-otology & Skull Base Surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US.

Professor Linda P. SARNA

Dean and Professor, School of Nursing,
The University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Lulu Wolf-Hassenplug Endowed Chair in Nursing

Professor Linda Sarna, Dean of the UCLA School of Nursing, is an oncology nurse with expertise in lung cancer and is a leader in nursing research and tobacco control. She was declared an “Edge Runner”, along with Dr. Stella A. Bialous, by the American Academy of Nursing for the Tobacco Free Nurses initiative, which aimed to expand nursing education, leadership and research in tobacco control. This was the first programme in the United States to help nurses with smoking cessation and was recognised as an exemplar by WHO. Professor Sarna has partnered with nursing organisations around the world to develop policies and programmes in this area. She has published extensively about the leadership role of nurses in tobacco control education and policy, including papers about web-based educational interventions for nurses in Asia and Central/Eastern Europe. She led the effort to implement the tobacco-free policy at University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Sarna received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oncology Nursing Society in 2018.

Keynote Speakers