Medical XR Advisory Council

Julia A. Scott, PhD is Director of the Brain and Memory Care Lab at Santa Clara University. Dr. Scott's research program utilizes external partnerships in healthcare to develop projects at the intersection of neuroscience, medical imaging, and virtual reality applications. She received her training in neuroscience at University of California campuses (Davis, San Diego, and San Francisco).

She has published widely on normal and abnormal neurodevelopment, as well as brain aging. Dr. Scott is translating her BCI-VR research into digital health applications. She co-founded Gambit Labs in 2021 with the mission of empowering youth to take the lead in ensuring their own well-being by developing specific cognitive skills that underlie healthier habits of mind.

Tech entrepreneur focused on digital health and mental well-being, TEDx speaker, and writer.

Biologist, Ph.D. in Neuropharmacology, with International academic research experience in pharmacology, organic chemistry, and molecular biology in the fields of oncology and neuronal metabolism.

Since 2017, CEO and co-founder of Softcare Studios, a digital health startup specialized in developing virtual reality solutions for stress management and therapy education in patients undergoing medical treatments.

Paul Jones, Data Governance and Innovation Advisor at XRSI. He is highly passionate about technology, the future, storytelling, and the convergence of strategies.

Paul is an active member of the IEEE Working Group for the Spatial Web. As the former Head of Innovation Labs, and the Emerging Technologies team at AstraZeneca. Paul has been experimenting with bleeding-edge technologies for two decades. Latterly identifying the need, architecting the solution, and establishing an XR capability of agnostic Enterprise scalable platforms within AstraZeneca.

In his current role with Immerse, Paul is a trusted partner for the Life Sciences industry, helping establish and realize benefits from XR in a secure, privacy-first, and trusted way. This is not only for these companies but also to ensure that the data of patients and the vulnerable is considered and protected at every turn.

His favorite quote he lives by, is, "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein.

Professor Shafi Ahmed is a multi-award-winning surgeon, teacher, futurist, innovator, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Medical Realities, an XR education company, and performed the world’s first operation streamed live in 360 in 2016.

He is currently a member of the NHS Assembly, advising on the long-term plan. He was previously an advisor to the Abu Dhabi Ministry of Health to help deliver innovation and digital Health and is currently the Vodafone UK Connected Health Ambassador.

In 2018 he was awarded the Future NHS award for NHS70 by Members of Parliament. In 2017 he was the top British Asian star in Tech. He was also British Bangladeshi of the Year 2017. He has delivered over 250 international keynotes on the future of healthcare and digital transformation, and his work has been featured in over 400 newspapers, tech journals, and mainstream TV news channels, including Sky, BBC, CNN, ABC, Al Jazeera, CNBC, Time, Forbes, Bloomberg. He is one of the top 20 global influencers in Digital Health and Virtual Reality.

He chairs the Webit Health summit in Spain, bringing together 15000+ innovators across all tech verticals, and also co-founded the GIANT health summit in London. He is one of the top 20 global influencers in digital health and innovation and was a HIMSS Future50 clinical leader in 2020.

Divya Chander is an anesthesiologist (MD UCSD, residency UCSF) and neuroscientist (Ph.D. UCSD) who also works at
the intersection of health, data, technology, and data security. She is a practicing physician, Chair of Neuroscience
and Faculty of Medicine at Singularity University, former faculty in the Stanford Department of Anesthesiology, and
Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center. An advocate for data and biometric rights, she
serves as medical advisor to the Extended Reality Safety Initiative (XRSI.org) and is helping develop standards for
identity and sensitive healthcare data security. Dr. Chander also leads 2 companies she co-founded during the
pandemic – Lucidify, a continuous, intelligent brain monitoring platform for the detection of delirium, and Plexxus,
a company building the data security fabric for secure communications and transactions, supporting the integration
of IoT devices to help build the world’s connected global immune system. She was named one of 2020’s top digital
health innovators by Intelligent Health AI. Dr. Chander also served on a NASA task force for COVID19 and directed
the post-pandemic global health initiative for OneShared.World. Her research involves mapping consciousness and
writing algorithms for the automated tracking of altered states, elaborating theories of consciousness (which she
presented on the TED-NYC and UN stages), predicting the effect of human augmentation on consciousness, and
how mapping consciousness in humans may enable us to recognize it in non-human, intelligent beings (both on
and off-planet, through initiatives like SETI, where she joins the newly formed Complexity Group). Dr. Chander also
contributes to space life sciences and medicine. A finalist for astronaut selection and an alumnus of the
International Space University, Dr. Chander has performed remote simulations of trauma rescues, anesthesia, and
surgery in Mars analog settings.

Her desire to alter her own Consciousness is to someday see the Earth rising from
the surface of the moon.

Oliver is a chartered physiotherapist and VR developer.
As a physiotherapist, he focuses especially on the areas of hydrokinetic pool therapy, telerehabilitation, and robotics at the Don Gnocchi Clinic in Torino, Italy.

As a programmer, he founded XRehab and has developed VR Kinesis, a VR app for rehabilitation, exergaming, and accessibility for fitness in VR.

With a solid background as a sound engineer & multi-instrumentalist, and as a bilingual who has worked many years in the field of English teaching & translation, he is working with various dev teams towards the creation of VR/AR apps in the areas of language learning, fitness, and music production.

He is the host of the Singularity Watch podcast by Ready Hacker One. 

Walter Greenleaf is a research scientist, trained in Neuro and Behavioral Science, and a medical product developer, with a specific focus on virtual reality and digital health technology. He's been active in developing Clinical Virtual Reality Systems for more than 30 years.

He recently served as the Director of the Mind Division, Stanford Center on Longevity, and he's currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s MediaX Program and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. In addition to his work at Stanford, he is SVP of Strategic & Corp. Affairs to MindMaze and Chief Science Advisor to Pear Therapeutics. He is a VR technology and neuroscience advisor to several early-stage medical product companies.

His doctoral research at Stanford in Neuro & Behavioral Science focused on the interaction between hormones and human behavior. While working on his dissertation, he founded the first of several successful medical product companies. He has since maintained this dual-role in academics and business – lecturing, conducting research and publishing, while concurrently developing and bringing medical products to market.

As a pioneer that has remained active in the development of medical applications of Virtual Reality Technology, he also frequently contributes to the field as a keynote speaker, as an editor for a leading journal, and as a conference organizer.

In behavioral medicine, he has developed and helped bring to market systems for the treatment of PTSD, anxiety disorders, autism spectrum disorders, and addictions. 

Donna Brady Raziano, MD, MBA, FACP, AGSF is the Chief Medical Officer of Mercy LIFE, Mercy Home Health and LIFE St. Mary. Dr. Raziano’s credentials include ABIM board certification in Geriatric Medicine and Hospice & Palliative Care as well as a MBA in Health Care Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Raziano has been passionate about serving older adults for her entire professional career. For the past 15 years she has been responsible for the delivery of care in multiple full risk PACE locations as well manage their Medicare Part D plans. Her leadership also includes oversight of professional primary care staff at six PACE day centers in Philadelphia county, Delaware county and Bucks county.

Dr. Raziano has lectured extensively and has been a leader in Innovation and Geriatrics.

In 2012, she received the Physician Executive Health Care Innovation Award from the Philadelphia Business Journal. In 2016, she received the SmartCEO Magazine’s 2016 Philadelphia Executive Management award, and in 2018, she was the recipient of the Dr. Barbara Bell Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Geriatric Medicine.

Dr. Aebersold’s professional and academic career is focused on advancing the science of learning applied in simulation to align clinician and student practice behaviors with research evidence to improve learner and health outcomes.  She focuses her scholarship in both high fidelity and virtual reality simulation and is a national leader and expert in simulation. Her scholarship has culminated in developing the Simulation Model to Improve Learner and Health Outcomes (SMILHO).

XRSI’s Medical XR Adviser, Michelle Aebersold is a Clinical Professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing and  Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Currently, Dr. Aebersold is involved with various research projects including:

• MOSST Chemotherapy Safety 
• We Heart VR 
• Augmented Reality to Improve Stroke Care
• Improving Nursing Students' Resilience to Bullying Behavior
• IMPACTS – Improving Pediatric Acute Care through Simulation Training 
• Closing the loop: new data tools for measuring the change in the quality of nursing education and the value of new approaches to instruction (PI) University of Michigan School of Nursing.

Her interests include:

• Simulation
• Virtual reality
• Augmented reality
• Serious games
• Innovative education methods
• Patient safety

Charles Nduka is a practicing surgeon specialising in restoring facial expressions. He is also a leading researcher in facial paralysis and developed a concept of wearable facial expression biosensing and rehabilitation. His obsession with virtual reality started over 25 years ago when he published a review in the British Journal of Surgery on the use of VR for surgical training. For the last five years he has been focussing on developing VR hardware and software tools for privacy preserving emotional and wellbeing monitoring.

His research is funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and he collaborates with leading mental health clinicians and researchers internationally. Current research is focussed on the potential for VR to address the problems facing his patients affected by facial disfigurement, particularly mental health conditions such as social anxiety disorder. VR based mental health therapies create particular challenges around data security, privacy, and clinical validation. 

Charles qualified in medicine from both Oxford University and Imperial College and his surgical practice is based at Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex, UK. He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College and Honorary Reader (Associate Professor) at Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

Callie has launched and operated innovation labs, accelerators, and hackathons for organizations that include the United States Department of Defense, NYU, Amazon, and the Tri-Institutional Program at Weill Cornell Medicine, The Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She coached 100+ early-stage digital health entrepreneurs on their path towards growth and fundraising and went on to launch a co-working space’s new location in NYC. Callie’s passion for immersive technology inspired her work developing a collaboration tool for virtual reality during her fellowship at Oculus Launchpad in 2018.

Ryan Cameron has been a serial innovator since 1997.

In 2000, Ryan led a team to create the first interactive versions of the beloved Little Golden Books for Disney Interactive, and then became CTO of an international US-based firm that delivered online education to Fortune 100 corporate employees.  For the next 10 years, Ryan was CTO for online educational companies before starting his own innovative online educational company. He has advised on international boards and organizations as well. Ryan has created online educational products that have won numerous awards and have helped hundreds of thousands of Fortune 500 employees learn important new skills in multi-year award-winning online programs. Joining Copernicus Studios in 2013, he led the interactive division, creating one of the first speech recognition engines tuned to children’s voices to empower early literacy. He founded Electric Puppets in 2016 and, in partnership with the IWK Children's hospital pediatric vision sciences group, has created the first patent-pending Medical VR platform for research and assessment starting with Ophthalmology. Ryan is an avid rare book, art, and antique collector and lives on an acreage in Chester, Nova Scotia.

Sarah has spent her career working across the interdisciplinary arts, academia, healthcare and technology as a producer, curator, artist and researcher. She graduated from the University of Kent with a First Class Honours in Anthropology with a Year in Japan BSc. Following her degree, she worked with the NHS before moving into contemporary art, worked with organizations including Fabrica Gallery, Lighthouse, The School of Life, The Big Anxiety Festival and Stanford University.

In May 2019 she founded Hatsumi, a research and design studio exploring the intersection of arts, health and immersive technology. We work with patients, artists, researchers and healthcare professionals to develop experiences that challenge how we think and feel about the world and imagine the future of health and wellbeing. She is the producer on Deep, a meditative VR experience controlled by breathing, and the Healthcare Lead for Immerse UK, working to support a community of UK XR healthcare practitioners and find ways that creative technologists, researchers, and healthcare practitioners can work together to create a sustainable future for XR in healthcare.

Leading Technologies Advisor
National Health Service
United Kingdom

Richard passionately believes that education has the power to transform lives. In his role as learning technologies advisor to the NHS, he gets to do just that, by researching and developing new technologies to support every step of a healthcare learners’ education. Throughout his career, Richard has supported the delivery of education and training with health and care organizations across the UK; international development work with governments in Mexico, Malaysia, and South East Asia; and building learning and acting as an ambassador with LearnAppeal in Kenya.