Alfred Cuschieri


Sir Alfred Cuschieri is a Maltese-British academic and surgeon. He is most notable for his pioneering contribution to the development and clinical implementation of minimal access surgery, also known as key-hole surgery. He has been Professor of Surgery at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna since 2003 as well as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Medical Science and Technology at the University of Dundee since 2008.

Career

Cuschieri obtained his medical degree from the Royal University of Malta in 1961. Soon after graduation he left Malta for the United Kingdom to undertake further research into his areas of surgical and technological interest at the University of Liverpool. At Liverpool, he rose to become a lecturer in the medical school and then, in 1974, to a Personal Chair in Surgery.
In 1976, Cuschieri moved north to join Dundee's School of Medicine as Professor of Surgery and Chairman of the Surgery and Molecular Oncology Department. It was while working at Ninewells Hospital in the city that he and his team first began researching the medical and technological basis for minimal access surgery. Cuschieri's team took advantage of, among other internal and external ergonomic developments, smaller cameras allowing insertion into the incision made in the skin; as a result of this progress the first minimally invasive surgery in the UK was carried out at Ninewells in 1987.
A lack of appropriate training in this form of surgery, and instances of procedures going wrong even resulting in deaths, led to some concern and mistrust in the new techniques. As a result, training units were set up at hospitals and medical schools around the UK with one of the first designated in 1993 under Cuschieri's directorship. Cuschieri holds some fifty-eight patents for various surgical instruments and has been originally published around five hundred times in peer-reviewed journals; he has been European Editor-in-Chief of Surgical Endoscopy since 1992.

Honours and awards