Dr. Mark Zafereo is a Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas where he is Section Chief of Head and Neck Endocrine Surgery and Associate Medical Director of the Head & Neck Center. Dr. Zafereo serves as Treasurer of the American Thyroid Association, and on the American Head & Neck Society Research and Education Foundation Board of Trustees. He has previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, and the International Thyroid Oncology Group. Dr. Zafereo leads several national multicenter clinical trials on neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgery for advanced differentiated, medullary, and anaplastic thyroid cancers. He has published significantly on Thyroid and other Head & Neck cancers, speaking nationally and internationally. His clinical practice focuses on patients afflicted with thyroid cancer and parathyroid neoplasms.

Professor Hisham Mehanna is the Chair of Head and Neck Surgery, and Director of the Institute of Head and Neck Studies and Education, at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Hisham’s clinical interests are recurrence head and neck cancer surgery. Prof Mehanna established and ran the UK’s first clinic dedicated to the multi-disciplinary treatment of head and neck and thyroid cancer recurrence.

Hisham has a keen interest in clinical and translational research, heading a research team of 20 researchers, and holding over £17 million in research grants. His main area of his research revolves around improving the management of head and neck cancer through the use of innovative treatments and dynamic risk stratification and assessment. His research spans translational research, early and late phase clinical trials. He is chief investigator of several multicentre and multinational clinical trials, including the PET NECK trial (published in the NEJM in 2016), and the De-escalate study (Lancet 2018) and EPIC HPV (Lancet Onc 2023).

He is also the President of the Head and Neck Cancer International Group (the umbrella organisation of 22 national clinical trials groups), and past President of the British Association of Head Neck Oncologists (BAHNO), and past Chair of the UK’s National Cancer Research Institute’s head and neck group, responsible for all head neck cancer research in the UK.

Professor Che-Wei Wu is the Chair and Professor of the School of Medicine at Kaohsiung Medical University (KMU) and the Chief of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at KMU Hospital in Taiwan. He earned his MD, MMSc, and PhD degrees from KMU. He is currently the Board Member of the International Neural Monitoring Study Group (INMSG), a Council member of the Asia-Pacific Society of Thyroid Surgery (APTS), a Director of Taiwan Head and Neck Society (THNS) & Taiwan Society of Otorhinolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery (TSOHNS), and an editorial board member of many international journals.

Professor Wu has focused his research on applying intraoperative electrophysiologic neuromonitoring (IONM) to prevent injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) and the external branch of the superior laryngeal nerve (EBSLN) during thyroid and parathyroid surgery since 2005. His research team has developed an experimental animal model using continuous IONM to investigate the mechanisms of RLN injury and has developed several novel IONM techniques.

Professor Mercante is involved in several National and International Clinical Research Groups as Coordinator and Principal Investigator, with the aim to promote a multidisciplinary approach to the Head and Neck Cancer Patient in order to reach an early diagnosis and to offer a personalized treatment, also focusing on the quality of life of the patient.

His clinical activities are mainly devoted to Head and Neck surgery, particularly to thyroid and parathyroid glands surgery, minimally invasive approaches, robotic surgery and open neck surgery for laryngeal and pharyngeal cancers, major and minor salivary glands tumors, reconstructive head and neck surgery with free and pedunculated flaps, as well as to the treatment of functional pathologies through phonosurgery, endoscopic nasal and sinus surgery, sleep apnea surgery and pediatric ENT surgery.