An admittedly unusual path, with the common thread of research and underlined by an insatiable curiosity and investigative nature for life around him, has driven Mark. He initially read Chemistry at Imperial College, incorporating both a year of pharmaceutical research in the USA and a Masters project attempting to synthesise a natural product with anti-cancer potential. Following a 5-month project undertaking animal behavioural research of Lions and Hyaenas in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans of Botswana, Mark read medicine at St George’s Hospital Medical School on their graduate entry programme.

After Foundation and Core Anaesthetic (ACCS) training in London, Mark undertook a Clinical Research Fellowship based in the Adult Critical Care Unit of the Royal London Hospital. Here he looked at the immune response following transfusion to critically ill trauma patients, presenting this work at the ESICM in Barcelona in 2014. Additional projects looked at the immune response in patients with bacteraemia and during the perioperative period of major abdominal surgery.

Mark moved to the East of England Deanery to start Registrar training and an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship in Anaesthesia. His longterm interest has been in the Neurobiology of Consciousness and he is currently working in projects examining conscious level and task performance under sedation and general anaesthesia in Volunteers, with the intention of applying this work to improved conscious level monitoring of patients in the operating theatre and exploring the fundamental nature of what it means to be Human. He plans to complete a research degree and subsequently to continue these lines of investigation alongside clinical interests in Neuro-anaesthesia.