Dr. Backous is a board certified Neurotologist Puget Sound ENT, Proliance Surgeons in Edmonds, Washington. He attended medical school at the University of Washington (1989), did his residency in Otolaryngology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas (1995), and completed his fellowship in Neurotology in 1997 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is also a 2012 graduate of the Executive Development Program from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He founded the Center for Hearing and Skull Base Surgery at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington in 2010 and continues to focus on lateral skull base surgery there. He has over 20 years of experience consulting with manufacturers in the medical device and surgical technology spaces, and is the Principal in 17 Consulting. He has worked with the United States FDA in developing a standard for cochlear implant device reliability, which is now implemented and is contributing the developing ISO standard. He has actively practiced in academic, institutional and now private practice settings. He serves on the Board for the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. His medical research interests focus on implantable hearing device program efficiency for improved patient access and program viability and on the economic viability of specialty surgery practice models.

Dr. Backous is married to Julie and they have three adult children. He enjoys travel, golf, waterskiing, hiking and family activities.

Marcel Levi (1964) is Professor of Medicine at University College London and chief executive of University College London Hospitals (UCLH). He is also a practicing consultant in Acute & Vascular Medicine and Haematology at UCLH. His previous position was professor and dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Amsterdam and chairman of the Executive Board of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After his medical training and specialization in Internal Medicine at the University of Amsterdam he obtained his PhD with honours (1991) and was appointed as a Fellow by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science. He worked at the University of Perugia, Italy and the Center for Transgene Technology and Genetherapy of the University of Leuven, Belgium. He has published more than 700 articles in international scientific journals and has been awarded a number of international research awards. He was chairman of the Netherlands Organization for Medical Research (ZON-MW) between 2008 and 2016 and is currently chairman of the scientific board of several national charities, including the Dutch Heart Foundation and the AIDS fund. He is also on the Board of the National Cancer Institute. He was elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science (KNAW) and is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.  He is associate editor of seven international journals in the field of Haematology and Internal Medicine.

Richard Ramsden graduated MBChB from St Andrews University – many years ago. He fled to London for his ENT training at the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital and the London Hospital (before it was Royal). He intended to return to Scotland but only got as far as Manchester where he worked as an Otologist, Neuro-otolgist and Skull Base Surgeon for over 30 years at Manchester Royal Infirmary and at Hope Hospital, Salford.   He established a joint Neuro-otology team and spent many happy hours removing acoustic neuromas with a series of friendly neurosurgeons.  He was involved in the early days of multichannel cochlear implants and established the Manchester programme in 1988.  He developed an interest in NF2 and did the first Brainstem Implants in the UK.  He was awarded an Honorary Professorship in 1994 and an MBE for services to Otolaryngology from Her Majesty the Queen in 2015.  He has contributed many book chapters and around 300 peer reviewed articles, a small minority of which are still worth reading.   He is spending his declining years in Oxfordshire and is frequently invited to contribute to the literature on the history of ENT which seems appropriate for one of his veneration.  He tries to play more golf but has come to the sad conclusion that if he hasn’t mastered it by now he never will.

Professor Rea is an otologist and neuro-otologist based at University Hospitals of Leicester, UK. He has a busy middle ear surgical practice, particularly for cholesteatoma, and has developed The Leicester Balance Clinic into one of the busiest in the UK handling 7,000 balance appointments per year.

He is currently President of The British Society of Otology (2020-2022) and has been elected as President of the Royal Society of Medicine, Section of Otology, with his term 2013-2014. Previously he Chaired the British Society of Neuro-otology for 6 years.

Professor Rea is Honorary Professor of Balance Medicine at De Montfort University, and Honorary Professor to the Departments of Neuroscience and Informatics at The University of Leicester.

He is on the faculty of a number of national and international meetings and has organised the popular annual 3-day Leicester Balance Course since 2004. Teaching has played an important part in his career.

He has a busy research programme and is clinical director at Leicester’s balance research laboratory which has a share of a $2,000,000 NIH grant. Current research projects include exploring the central control mechanisms of balance in particular with respect to vestibular migraine and PPPD. He is a core member of the UK’s Meniere’s Disease Registry. Other active research that he will include in his talk at EAONO includes identifying COVID in the middle ear and nasal mucosa of infected patients, virtual consultations for neuro-otology, changing patterns of ENT infections during COVID, and the management of acute mastoiditis in children.

Andrew Forge is Emeritus Professor of Auditory Cell Biology at the UCL Ear Institute. He gained a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Leeds before taking up a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Laryngology, now UCL Ear Institute. There he began studies of the ultrastructural anatomy and pathology of the inner ear. His research has covered the structural specialisations of the cells of the inner ear and development of high resolution microscopy techniques to study them; the cellular basis of hearing impairment and vestibular (balance) dysfunction and interventions to prevent them; and regeneration of sensory cells in the inner ear. He has over150 publications. He was the lead applicant for the award that funded the building of the Ear Institute.