Opening Lectures

Professor Stephanie Klein Nagelvoort Schuit is Vice Chair of the Executive Board of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and Professor of Future Healthcare at the University of Groningen. She holds executive responsibility for patient care, digital transformation (IT), and postgraduate medical education at the UMCG. Klein Nagelvoort Schuit is actively engaged in national programs shaping the future of healthcare delivery, digital transformation and data infrastructure, quality of care, and workforce planning. She contributes to multiple organisations including UMCnl, the National Health Care Institute and the Dutch Ministries of Health and of Economic Affairs. She also serves on the Dutch National Growth Fund Advisory Committee.

Prior to joining the UMCG in 2020, she spent two decades at Erasmus MC as an internist–intensivist–acute medicine specialist, department head, deputy chief of staff, and Program Director for Internal Medicine training. She is the founder of abcdeSIM and VirtualMedSchool, award-winning serious gaming platforms for medical training, and previously served on the board of the Erasmus Trustfonds and the Supervisory Board of the health insurer CZ.

Professor Maurizio Cecconi is an anaesthesiologist, intensive care specialist, and Chair of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Units at Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy. He is the Vice Scientific Director for Clinical Research and the Coordinator of the PhD PRIME (Personalized Care and Innovation in Medicine and Engineering) at Humanitas University in Milan. He studied in Italy (University of Udine), Spain (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), the UK (St George’s University of London), and the USA (Harvard Medical School). He worked for 14 years as an NHS Consultant UK, before joining Humanitas in Milan, Italy in 2018. He has authored more than 500 peer-reviewed articles and has an H-Index of 102.

His research focuses on improving outcomes in perioperative care, data science and artificial intelligence, and the physiology of shock, acute respiratory failure, and sepsis. He is Past President of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, which he led through the COVID-19 pandemic. He designed and directed the EU-funded C19_SPACE training course, which provided 20,000 healthcare workers with practical training in record time during the pandemic. He is part of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and has collaborated with WHO on the COVID-19 and Influenza Clinical Guidelines. He has been named by JAMA has one of the most influential healthcare leaders of the pandemic. In 2020, the Italian president nominated him Knight of the Order of Merit (O.M.R.I) of the Italian Republic. In 2025, he received the ESICM Society Medal.