Meet the Team
Georgia R. Layton is an East Midlands specialty trainee in Cardiothoracic Surgery, originally from Manchester and is the creator and curator of the Cardiothoracic Compendium.
She has extensive experience in participating within trainee-led research, having designed and developed a national collaborative study, The RICOCHET Study. In addition, she has sat on a trial management group and undertaken active roles in the West Midlands Research Collaborative and Cardiothoracic Interdisciplinary Research Network.
Georgia founded the Cardiothoracic Compendium (@CTSCompendium ) as a social media driven learning platform for herself and other trainees having found it difficult to take in the breadth of research in our specialty. The aim is simple; to summarise all key research across both cardiac and thoracic surgery over time with the assistance of peers and senior colleagues who are experts within their field.
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She is heavily involved in promoting excellence in surgical training through her role in the Association of Surgeons in Training (ASiT) executive committee and is passionate about promoting equality and diversity, and widening access for all surgical specialties.
Mustafa Zakkar is an associate professor and honorary consultant cardiac surgeon at the University of Leicester and Glenfield Hospital, Leicester.
In 2010, he received a PhD in cardiovascular medicine from the University of London for his work investigating the role of blood flow and shear stress on the development of vascular endothelial cell activation and the development of atherosclerosis and vein grafts disease.
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He started his higher national surgical training in cardiothoracic surgery at St George’s hospital in London then moved to Bristol as academic clinical lecturer in cardiothoracic surgery. Having been trained by world leading cardiac surgeons such as Prof G D Angelini and Mr A J Bryan, he then relocated to Paris, France to be trained in aortic repair surgery by Dr E Lansac.
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Following higher surgical training, Mr Zakkar took up a locum cardiac consultant surgeon post at St George’s Hospital in London before moving to his current post in Leicester.
At present, his research focuses on the role of shear stress upon signaling pathways of vascular dysfunction and he has a very successful track record of supervising many PhD and MD (Res) students.
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Mr Zakkar has a key supervisory role with the cardiothoracic compendium by providing expert opinion and quality control of all compendium content prior to publication.
Collaborators
Collaborators have provided critical appraisal of papers which is then reviewed, edited and formatted. We thank them for their valuable contributions.
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Marinos Koulouroudias is a Cardiothoracic Surgery Trainee and ACF in the East Midlands.
Luke Rogers is a Cardiothoracic Surgery Trainee in London and the Royal College of Surgeons Associate Specialty Lead for Cardiac Surgery
Ramanish Ravishankar is a final year medical student at the University of Edinburgh