Professor Bernhard Riedel

MB.ChB, FCA, FANZCA, FAHA, FASE, MMed, MBA, PhD

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Bernhard is the Director of the Department of Anesthesia, Perioperative and Pain Medicine at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre; Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Integrated Critical Care Medicine and The Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, University of Melbourne; Clinical Associate Researcher at the Cancer & Neural-Immune Research Laboratory, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Previous academic appointments included: Professor and Deputy Chair in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre (USA) and Professor in Cardiac Anaesthesiology at Vanderbilt University (USA); and Consultant Cardiac Anaesthesiologist at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust (UK).

Bernhard’s academic interests focus on improving surgical outcomes, especially following cancer surgery. Bernhard’s collaborative research program to date has resulted in more than 60 research grants (>$12M), 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and 3 edited books (including ‘Acute Care of the Cancer Patient’).

Bernhard’s research interests have improved the understanding of perioperative factors that contribute to complications following major surgery—with strategies for enhanced risk stratification (including measuring functional capacity with cardiopulmonary exercise testing, assessing underlying endothelial dysfunction) and preoperative optimization (including prehabilitation with exercise therapy and haematinic optimization) to reduce complications after surgery.

Specific to the field of onco-anaesthesia, Bernhard’s research collaborative investigates the interaction of perioperative adrenergic-inflammatory response and anaesthetic technique on tumor-progression signaling on the potential long-term postoperative complication—cancer recurrence. Bernhard has been invited to lecture at more than 120 international conferences, including numerous plenary lectures or visiting professorships.

He is the recipient of 11 awards for research, teaching and quality improvement; including a Health Minister award for excellence in clinical quality improvement, and effective mentoring has resulted in more than 30 academic awards to mentees within his team. He currently oversees 4 PhD students and 2 Masters students.