Michael Avidan

Michael Avidan trained at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and King's College Hospital in London. He is currently the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor of Anesthesiology at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis. He is an accomplished investigator in perioperative outcomes research, including large clinical trials. His major contributions have been in the fields of 1) prevention of intraoperative awareness; 2) postoperative neurologic outcomes; and 3) tracking health and well-being of surgical patients. He is an editor at the British Journal of Anaesthesia, and has launched an initiative to assess and improve inferential reproducibility in research. Reproducibility of methods and results are well recognized as major challenges in science, but discrepancies in interpretation are also common, and should be addressed deliberately and rigorously. One potential practical and testable solution to this problem, which is being spearheaded by the British Journal of Anaesthesia, entails structured, independent Discussion Sections for scientific manuscripts.