Thomas Smith

Background

About Thomas Smith

Prof Smith is an Australian clinician-scientist specialising in aerospace medicine, cardiopulmonary physiology and anaesthetics. He leads aerospace medicine research at King’s College London, an international centre of excellence in the field, and is a Consultant Anaesthetist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. He is currently Macintosh Professor of the Royal College of Anaesthetists. Prof Smith is a former Rhodes Scholar and Churchill Fellow and moved to King’s in 2017 from the University of Oxford. He has led many national and international research collaborations, and has undertaken studies in challenging and extreme environments including high-G human centrifuges, parabolic ‘zero-G’ flights, commercial airline flights and at high altitude in the remote Andes of Peru, as well as many hypoxia/altitude chambers and facilities (normobaric and hypobaric). His research has been awarded prestigious international prizes including the Ernsting, Liljencrantz and Tuttle Awards from the Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA), and the ASAM Aerospace Medicine Prize from the Australasian Society of Aerospace Medicine. In 2019 he gave the ASAM John Lane Oration in Sydney. Education in aerospace medicine and physiology has been a major focus of Prof Smith's career. At King's he leads a master's module on Aerospace and Environmental Physiology and teaches on the Diploma in Aerospace Medicine. He previously led the MSc in Space Physiology and Health in collaboration with ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Germany for several years. Clinically, Prof Smith specialises in anaesthesia for major high-risk urological surgery. He also has broad experience as a flight doctor in aeromedical critical care across multiple aircraft types and over 20 countries. During the COVID pandemic he was a full-time member of the critical care Mobile Emergency Rapid Intubation Team at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals. Prof Smith is an elected Fellow of AsMA and an elected Academician of the International Academy of Aviation and Space Medicine, and is currently- Chair of the Royal Aeronautical Society's Aerospace Medicine Group - The UK Medical Research Council’s advisor in aerospace medicine - A member of the UK Space Agency's Space Exploration Advisory Committee KCL profile: KCL research group: Clinical profile: Publications: @Prof_TG_Smith