Shafi Ahmed

Ahmed lives in London. He is married to Farzana Hussain, a general practitioner, with whom he has two children.[2]

He was born on 26 January 1969 in Sylhet District, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and came to the United Kingdom as a child.[3]

Ahmed attended Chadwell Heath High School (now Chadwell Heath Academy) before attending the Redbridge technical college.

From 1988 to 1993, he studied medicine at King's College Hospital School of Medicine. As the elected President of the Medical and Dental Society, he helped introduce medical ethics into the curriculum.

During his surgical training in London, he undertook a period of research at The Royal London Hospital and the Queen Mary University of London. In 2010, he obtained a PhD with a thesis entitled "The role of microarray profiling in predicting outcome in patients with colorectal cancer".[4]

Ahmed has been awarded four honorary PhDs (Honoris Causa) from Udabol University Bolivia, SIISDET Colombia, the University of Peru of Science and Informatics and EXIBED, Spain.

In 2017, he was appointed as an honorary professor at The University of Bradford and awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Medicine in 2019.[5]

In 2020 he was awarded the Spinoza Honorary professorship at the University of Amsterdam.[6]

Ahmed works in the Academic Centre of Surgery and has established minimally invasive colorectal surgery at the Royal London Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust.[8]

His main clinical interest is colorectal cancer, and he performs surgery for primary and recurrent disease as well as multi-visceral resections.

He has pioneered single incision laparoscopic colorectal surgery (virtual scarless surgery) and also works with liver surgeons to perform simultaneous laparoscopic liver and bowel resections for cancer. His other clinical interest is advanced stage 3/4 endometriosis, performing laparoscopic surgery with gynaecologists. This has led to the development and recognition of a national centre for endometriosis. In addition, he has specialist experience in complex abdominal wall hernias and reconstruction.[3]

From 2010 to 2015, Ahmed was the lead clinician and multi-disciplinary team lead for colorectal cancer at Barts Health NHS Trust. He was also a CQC specialist advisor in general surgery.

Ahmed was the Associate Dean for Barts and the London undergraduate medical students at The Royal London Hospital from 2010 to 2019 and was the lead for surgery. He was programme director for core surgical trainees for North East London 2012–2013 and Tutor in Surgery for the Royal London Hospital 2011–2013. He teaches innovation and digital transformation for surgeons at Harvard Medical School and Imperial College London.[9]

He is the civilian advisor for the British Armed forces for general surgery.

From 2013 to 2019, Ahmed was elected onto the council of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.[10] He had numerous roles and lead the International Surgical Training Programme. He was part of the Cancer 2020, 5 Year Forward View Taskforce 2015.[11] He is a member of the court of examiners and is an international convenor of the MRCS for Bangladesh.[12]

In 2007, Ahmed was appointed as a Consultant General, Laparoscopic and Colorectal surgeon to The Royal London Hospital and St Bartholomew's Hospital, Barts Health NHS Trust.

He was chosen to curate the NHS Twitter account from 27 February 2017 to 3 March 2017 and tweeted the world's first live operation via this account.

He was the clinical lead for surgery at the NHS Nightingale Hospital at Excel London during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Ahmed performed a live cancer operation at The Royal London Hospital on Channel 5 for the series Operation Live in 2018.

Ahmed is the module lead for an innovative new course at Barts and the London Medical School which aims to teach the third year medical students about future medicine and how to generate ideas to improve clinical care.[13][1] The students are taught by digital health innovators and those involved in Medtech from the UK and US.

Ahmed's company Virtual Medics developed the use of wearable technology in education and clinical practice. This has allowed the development of a web-placed platform to stream live and interactive teaching.

In May 2014, using Google Glass, he performed and streamed a live operation to 14 thousand students across 132 countries and 1100 cities.[16]

Ahmed is the co-founder of Medical Realities, a group offering surgical training products, specialising in virtual reality, augmented reality and serious games.[17] Through Medical Realities, he aims to provide tutorials in a modular format to teaching hospitals around the world. This will be made accessible to students and surgical trainees.

On 14 April 2016, in collaboration with Barts Health, Medical Realities and Mativision, he performed the world's first virtual reality operation recorded and streamed live in 360 degrees.[8][17][18][19] This was viewed by 55,000 people in 140 countries and 4000 cities and reached 4.6 million people on Twitter.

This event was covered worldwide on over 400 newspaper/online articles and BBC Click, Sky News, ARD German, TRT News, South American NTN, ABC News, Aljazeera, and Press TV.[20][21][22][23] His work has been featured on Wired, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ABC News, CNET, The Verge, Huffington Post, and Tech China.[24][25][26][27][16][28][29][30]

On 9 December 2016, he performed the world's first live operation using Snapchat Spectacles where he trained 200 medical students and surgical trainees, which was covered by Time magazine, and BBC.[31][32][33] The operation has been viewed over 100,000 times.[34]

He is a non-executive director of Medic creations, GPDQ and Imera.[35]

He is the chair of the GIANT (Global Innovation and New Technologies) Health Event in London and also the chair of the Webit Health conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, which showcases startups, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.[36][37]