Keynote speakers

Dr Rola Hallam, Consultant Anaesthetist

Award-winning doctor, humanitarian, campaigner, speaker,
entrepreneur and trauma-informed life coach.

Rola has been a doctor for 18 years - well all her life really. She specialises in anaesthesia and global health and has worked across the globe on the frontlines of health care in the UK, Sub-Saharan Africa and Syria during the last decade of war.

She has been honoured with several awards and is also the first Syrian TED Fellow and founder of CanDo - a humanitarian organisation supporting frontline health and aid workers to save children’s lives in their war-devastated communities. She has helped build 7 hospitals in Syria, including the first ever crowdfunded hospital, all together reaching over 4 million people.

She is a tireless campaigner for the protection of healthcare and children caught up in conflict, as well as for the critical need to focus on the health and wellbeing of frontline health and aid workers.

Rola is sought after as a transformational speaker who has shared global stages with presidents, celebrities and grassroots activists. Her online talks have been viewed over 11 million times, inspiring thousands to become changemakers.

Her work has been published in The Lancet and featured across the media including the New York Times, The Daily Show and in two BBC documentaries.

‘I was born a doctor. I have always known it was my calling but what I didn’t know was that my home country of Syria would shatter into a thousand little pieces, tearing millions of lives apart and that I would be using my medical skills as a humanitarian.’

Dr Beth Healey, Research MD, European Space Agency (ESA)

Beth, is an Emergency Medicine doctor and has worked for several years in the NHS as well as a variety of international settings. Fluent in French, this has included providing pre-hospital medical care in the Swiss Alps. 

As part of medical and logistical support teams she has worked in a number of extreme and remote environments including Svalbard, Siberia, Greenland, Antarctica and the North Pole. 

As research MD for the European Space Agency (ESA) she overwintered in Antarctica at spaceflight analogue ‘Concordia’, otherwise know as ’White Mars’. There, she researched the effects of isolation and extreme environment on the physiology and psychology of the crew.

During the winter due to the low temperatures (-80C) and long polar night (105 days without any sunlight) they were completely isolated even in case of emergency. This research has been used to help inform space agencies of the challenges future astronauts on long duration spaceflight missions may face as well as develop medical models required for such missions. She also participated on an overland traverse, driving a Caterpillar tractor 1,200 km across the Antarctic plateau.

Since returning she has contributed to a Space and Global Health UN specialist interest group considering how we can use space derived technology to solve medical problems on earth including life support systems, telemedicine and remote diagnostics.