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- 4935
Professor Bennett is the Academic Head of the Department of Anaesthesia, a Senior Staff Specialist in diving and hyperbaric medicine at Prince of Wales Hospital and Conjoint Professor in 
the faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He graduated from the University of New South Wales in 1979 and spent his early post-graduate training at the Prince Henry/Prince of Wales Hospitals before undertaking training in Anaesthesia in the UK. He returned to Sydney in 1990 as a retrieval specialist on the Lifesaver Helicopter and here developed an interest in both diving and hyperbaric medicine. He also has a strong interest in clinical epidemiology and is an experienced clinician and researcher. In 2002 he was the recipient of the Behnke Award for outstanding scientific achievement from the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society.
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- 4844
Born in Tasmania in 1960, David started scuba diving in 1981. Since graduating in 1984, he has always been active in diving and hyperbaric medicine, spending many hours when an 
intern as ‘nurse’ attendant in the old Royal Hobart Hospital (RHH) hyperbaric chamber, while his more senior colleagues supervised. He completed his DipDHM in 1987 and FACEM in Emergency Medicine in 1991. After time in Adelaide and Fremantle, he returned to Hobart, and in 1995 he was appointed Director of Emergency Medicine, and Chair of the Scientific Committee (ACEM), as well as working in hyperbaric medicine. In 1998, he became Medical Co-director of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine at RHH, and the following year was appointed Clinical Associate Professor in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, UTas; all this and running a private emergency medicine facility! Whilst in Fremantle, he commenced research on expired carbon monoxide (CO) as a marker for CO poisoning, but because of his clinical commitments, this took many years to complete as a doctoral dissertation. David has been heavily involved in diving medicine in numerous roles including medical consultant to various professional diving industry organisations; an examiner in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine, ANZCA; Chairperson of the ANZHMG; SPUMS Education Officer; SPUMS representative on the Australian Standards Committee on Occupational Diving, and in 2017 was re-elected SPUMS President for a second term. David now works full-time in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine, and is heavily involved in the strategic development of Post-Graduate training in Hyperbaric Medicine. He also actively teaches at three of Australia’s courses in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine, and has over 130 published scientific papers and abstracts. He has received national and international awards: The Derek Craig award (ADAS), Fellowship of Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine (UHMS), and Excellence in Commercial Diving Award (UHMS). In 2014, he was invited to provide medical supervision of the Australian Antarctic Diving Program at Casey Base. His research interests include: Doppler analysis of decompression stress; Doppler validation of sub-2400 m ascent to altitude guidelines; hookah diving safety, inner ear barotrauma, HBOT for lower limb trauma, oxygen delivery systems, diving risk management and in-chamber monitoring equipment. He is married with two daughters (both with gills!), and pursues many hobbies; carpentry and joinery, swimming, scuba diving, boating and fishing, and underwater photography.
(Photo taken during his Antarctic work with AAD.)
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- 7337
David Doolette is the Scientific Director of the U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit and an Associate Professor of Anaesthesiology at the University of Auckland. He has more than three
decades of research, development, testing, evaluation, and operationalization of new diving technologies. He is a leading international expert in the physiology, prevention, and treatment of decompression sickness. Other areas of expertise include saturation-excursion diving, submarine lock-in/out diving, closed-circuit rebreather diving, diver thermal protection, and diver fitness. In addition to contributions to the scientific literature, he has authored many military technical reports, contributed to the U.S. Navy Diving Manual, and written many other specialized diving procedures. He began diving in 1979, is a pioneer of technical diving, and an avid underwater cave explorer. He engages frequently with the recreational and technical diving communities as scientific communicator and has made profound impact on the way these communities dive. In recognition of outstanding contributions to undersea biomedical science, the U.S. Navy, and recreational and technical diving, he is a recipient of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Delores M. Etter Award, the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) Albert R. Behnke Award and the U.S. Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award. He has been a member of the Undersea Hyperbaric Medical Society since 1987 and a member of the South Pacific Underwater Medicine Society since 1990 and was that Society's Education Officer from 2001 to 2004.
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- 5621
Claus was born and raised in Germany. His diving career began in 1976 with training to become a rescue diver of the German Lifesaving Society. He is a certified Diving Instructor (CMAS****, ANDI Nitrox Instructor) with over 1800 logged dives. After graduating from Duesseldorf University he became a certified anaesthesiologist and specialist in intensive care and emergency medicine with diplomas in travel medicine of the German Society of Tropical medicine and in diving and hyperbaric medicine of the German Society of Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine.
His scientific career started in 1987 with research on nitrogen elimination after simulated scuba dives, which became his MD thesis and he cooperated with the German national aeronautics and space research centre where he was involved in research and manned very deep diving exploration beyond 700 msw. Later, he served as a Diving Medical Officer of the German Navy at the Naval Medical institute, where he had the chance to dive with the Navy SEAL Team and UDT divers. From 1997 to 2000 he was the head of the hyperbaric treatment facility of the University Hospital of Homburg and since 2000 he has worked in the Department of Anaesthesiology of the University Hospital of Ulm. Here, he continued his scientific work in the field of diving and hyperbaric medicine. His PhD thesis was on genotoxicity of hyperbaric oxygen. Claus has co-editor of five books on diving and travel medicine and intensive care medicine and published approximately 100 papers in scientific journals. He was awarded the Zetterström Award of the EUBS in 1999, the AGA Linde HBO-Award 2001 and, for his long-time dedication to in-water rescue, in 2004 the German President awarded him the Cross of the Order Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Today, he is Professor of Anaesthesiology and Head of the Division of Emergency Medicine of the Department of Anaesthesiology of the Hospital of Ulm, Ulm University of Medical School. In 2023 he additionally became the Founding Dean of Medical Faculty of the German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt.
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- 70
Alf Brubakk was born 1941 and completed his MD at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. After internship and a year in general practice, he received a grant to establish 
cooperation between the hospital in Trondheim, Norway and the University of Trondheim. This was given to start projects related to medical technology. At this time, there was no medical facility at the University of Trondheim and the grant was an effort to establish this. He and his colleagues developed a computer model of the cardiovascular system and started work on the use of ultrasound Doppler in cardiology. This later led to the establishment of VINGMED (now one of the largest companies in Scandinavia for distribution and services of high quality medical technology products) and to the development of the ultrasonic equipment that is now manufactured by General Electric. This work was the basis for his PhD on "Methods for studying flow dynamics in the left ventricle and the aorta in man". After working in cardiology for five years, he did two and a half years of anaesthesiology, after which he was appointed as Assistant Professor in Applied Physiology. This lasted for two years until he joined the Norwegian Underwater Institute in Bergen to participate in a number of saturation dive studies, Deepex I and II. He was in Bergen for five years, where he mainly worked on developing the use of ultrasound for studying decompression and bubble formation. In 1985 Alf returned to Trondheim, initially as a consultant mainly studying peripheral vascular disease. During this time, he established a programme in the physiology and medicine of extreme environments and was appointed Professor of Applied Environment Physiology in 1992. He has recently retired from that position but remains Professor Emeritus. He has been Head of the Diving Medical Advisory Committee (DMAC) the President of EUBS, and has twice received the Behnke Award from the UHMS.
(Photo taken at Stokkøya near Tronheim, Norway during a dive course.)