Professor Jag Dhanda is an Oral and Maxillofacial/Head and Neck Consultant Surgeon with a subspecialty interest in head and neck oncology and reconstruction and a Professor of Surgery and Professor of Extended Reality in Medicine and Surgery. His NHS practice is limited to free tissue transfer for complex head and neck reconstruction. He has been the successful recipient of three Royal College of Surgeons of England research fellowships (college, board and specialty) and a CRUK fellowship for his PhD in oncogenomics. Professor Dhanda is the founder and clinical lead for Virtual Reality in Medicine and Surgery (VRiMS.net), a trainee resource using live streaming and restreaming of cadaveric surgical techniques in virtual reality. He is conducting studies to scientifically evaluate and validate extended reality in medical education. VRiMS has released a VR app for basic life support and fire safety training for mandatory training. His research group is also developing a skin cancer augmented reality app to guide surgeons in diagnosis and surgical techniques for managing facial skin cancer. Professor Dhanda regular travels to low to middle income countries to develop teaching resources using extended reality, His group raises funds to develop innovations for global surgery and donate surgical instruments to rural surgeons as well as providing training for all of the surgical specialties using extended reality.

Timothy Jung is a leading expert in XR technology, with a focus on its applications in healthcare, education, and tourism. As Chair Professor of XR at Manchester Metropolitan University, he has conducted extensive research and published numerous articles on the subject. His work has been recognised with numerous awards and citations, solidifying his position as a global authority in the field. Honoured as a top 1% Influential Researcher Researchers in Highly Cited Researchers 2023 List by Clarivate and also a top 0.05% Highly Ranked Scholar by Scholar GPS, Jung’s contributions to XR are shaping the future of immersive technologies. As President of IAITI (International Association of Immersive Technology Innovation), he continues to drive innovation in the field.

Dr. Madeleine Keehner is CEO and Principal Scientist at Brighter Research. She has a PhD in Experimental Cognitive Psychology from the University of Bristol, with a particular interest in human spatial reasoning, and her areas of expertise span cognitive science, learning science, and assessment science. She was a Research Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Department of Surgery, where she studied spatial cognition in minimally invasive surgery, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), she studied cognitive processes and learner interactions with 3D visualizations for medical education. Prior to founding Brighter Research, she worked in the assessment industry for 11 years, most recently as Director of Cognitive and Learning Sciences at Educational Testing Service (ETS). She now works with clients in the training and education space, providing consulting and research services, and supporting key goals for advancing XR for learning and competency-based assessment across a range of disciplines and industries.

Marco is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is co-director (with Xueni ‘Sylvia’ Pan) of both the Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality and the Social, Empathic and Embodied Virtual Reality Lab. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement based interaction with VR. He also has a long-standing interest in technologies for learning having created the first MOOC from an English University and the first undergraduate degree on a MOOC platform. His work is highly interdisciplinary and includes applications and collaboration with fields such as dance and performance, medicine, education, games development, critical disability studies, developmental psychology and social neuroscience.

Sam is a neuropsychologist with an interest in immersive technologies and how they are best used in both training and patient care. Sam is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Exeter where he founded the Virtual Immersive Training and Learning (VITAL) research group (VITAL). He is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) for Cineon (www.cineon.io). Sam’s research uses technology to understand human performance and learning, applying theories from cognitive science and motor control psychology to understand how humans perform at their best. As immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) have become popular Sam has become interested in the ways in which they can be harnessed to enhance training, augment human performance, and enable innovative research. Sam has published more than 100 peer reviewed scientific articles, many of which have VR as the topic of enquiry or the methodology.

Dr. George Papagiannakis, co-founder and CEO of ORamaVR is a computer scientist specialized in computer graphics systems, extended reality algorithms and geometric computational models. His academic credentials include serving as Professor of Computer Graphics at the Computer Science department of the University of Crete, Greece, as Affiliated Research Fellow at the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science in the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Heraklion, Greece, where he leads the CG Group and as visiting Prof of CS at the University of Geneva.He has more than 100 publications in the field, and he is a member of CGS (Board Member), IEEE, Eurographics, ACM and SIGGRAPH professional societies. In 2011 he was awarded a Marie-Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development from the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency. He was conference chair of the Computer Graphics International 2016 Conference, in cooperation with CGS, ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH and Eurographics Associations. In 2017 he published a Springer-Nature book on Mixed Reality and Gamification which achieved more than 100.000 downloads so far. His pioneering research has attracted several awards as well as significant external R&D and VC funding at FORTH-ICS and ORamaVR.