Professor Shafi Ahmed is a surgeon, teacher, futurist, innovator, entrepreneur, and an evangelist in augmented and virtual reality. He is a cancer surgeon at the Royal London and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals and is associate dean of Bart’s Medical School. He has been given the accolade of being the most-watched surgeon in human history.
He received the Silver Scalpel Award in 2015 as the best national trainer in surgery and in 2017 was named the British Bangladeshi Person of the Year. He is currently serving as an elected member of the council of the Royal College of Surgeons, where he leads the international surgical training programme.
His mission is to merge the world of medicine, global education, and virtual reality to democratize and scale surgical education to make it affordable and accessible to everyone by using the power of connectivity to allow equitable surgical care. He co-founded Medical Realities, which recently released the first VR interactive surgical training module.
Shafi made world headline news in 2014 by streaming a live operation using Google Glass to 14,000 students in 132 countries. On April 14, 2016, he performed the world’s first virtual reality operation, which was watched by 55,000 people in 140 countries and reached 4.5 million on Twitter. In December 2016, he used Snapchat spectacles to teach surgery, which has been viewed by over 2 million people, had over 100,000 downloads, and reached 54 million people on Twitter.
He recently has been disrupting the traditional medical school curriculum by launching the Barts X Medicine Programme, which has embedded future technologies and entrepreneurship into the medical school.