Tamara Fitzgerald is an associate professor in the Division of Pediatric Surgery at Duke University. Her academic focus is global surgery capacity-building and medical device design for low- and middle-income countries. She works in partnership with pediatric surgeons in sub-Saharan Africa to increase training and support for surgeons, thereby improving children’s access to surgical care.

Dr. Fitzgerald received her bachelor’s degree and doctorate in biomedical engineering and her medical degree from Boston University, and completed a general surgery residency and fellowship in pediatric surgery at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Dr. Fitzgerald’s work focuses on building surgical capacity — empowering and working with local surgeons in low- and middle-income countries to increase the number of surgical providers, improve quality and increase surgical support services such as intensive care and anesthesia services. She has several ongoing projects regarding the burden of surgical disease for patients and their families in low- and middle-income countries, surgical training and capacity-building.

Peter Nthumba is the head and program director of plastic reconstructive surgery at the AIC Kijabe Hospital. He is a clinical associate professor and director of global health with the Department of Plastic Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also an adjunct associate professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Temple, Texas.

Dr. Nthumba attended medical school at the University of Nairobi. In 2002, he graduated with a Master of Medicine in surgery. In 2004, he became a fellow of the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa. Between 2006 and 2008, he underwent training in plastic surgery at the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Cosmetic Surgery at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India. He also trained in hand surgery at the Paul Brand Hand Research Unit in the same institution. He next took a fellowship in reconstructive microsurgery, which included training and participation in the hand transplant unit in Valencia, Spain, for a year, before returning to AIC Kijabe Hospital to develop the plastic reconstructive and hand unit. 

He has a Master of Science degree in epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the University of London. Dr. Nthumba has interests in research, trauma, surgical infection, reconstructive surgery and global surgery. He is widely published in his areas of interest. He started a small research nonprofit, EACH Research, to teach and mentor medical students and surgical residents through research at no fee to the trainees.

Wayne Martin Koch is professor of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he has been on faculty for 35 years. He is director of the Head and Neck Fellowship Program at Mbingo Baptist Hospital in Northwest Cameroon, which is affiliated with the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons and the Johns Hopkins Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. 

Dr. Koch is a past president of the American Head and Neck Society, and serves on the board of the African Head and Neck Society. He is a former chair of the board of directors of the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons.

Among Dr. Koch’s landmark publications are studies demonstrating how key molecular events such as p53 mutation and HPV contribute to the development of head and neck cancer. His peer-reviewed publications include six articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Koch is also involved in humanitarian outreach focused on training surgeons in several African nations.