We are fortunate to host in Chania two renown experts in the field of pre-clinical trials within the area of critical care medicine and beyond. They have agreed to share their hands-on experience and to support our 2019 Wiggers-Bernard initiative aimed at developing and performing a pre-clinical multicenter randomized control trial in sepsis.

Malcolm MacLeod. Malcolm Macleod is Professor of Neurology and Translational Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. For 15 years his research has focussed on the identification of risks of bias in research reports as a route to research improvement activity. With colleagues he developed good laboratory practice guidelines for in vivo stroke research, published in 2009, and has developed a framework for multicentre animal studies. He has evaluated changes in reporting quality following a change in editorial policy at NPG, and the effect of mandatory completion of the ARRIVE checklist in reporting quality at PLoS One. He is academic co-ordinator of the EQIPD Innovative Medicines Initiative, developing a quality framework for in vivo research, a founder member of the UK Reproducibility Network, and a member of the UK Commission for Human Medicines.

Patrick M. Kochanek. Patrick Kochanek is Distinguished Professor of Critical Care Medicine, the Ake N. Grenvik Professor and Vice Chair of Critical Care Medicine; Director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research; and Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Bioengineering and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  As the Safar Center Director for 25 years, he has a long track-record of leading a translational and multi-departmental team studying traumatic and ischemic brain injury and neurointensive care, funded by the NIH, US Department of Defense, and the Laerdal Foundation.  He has >540 listings on PubMed and was identified by ISI as the most prolific author in the field of TBI from 2001 to 2014.  He is currently PI of Operation Brain Trauma Therapy (for the U.S. Department of Defense) that involves testing of various medications in multi-center pre-clinical TBI models.