Dr Amy Hughes is currently a specialist registrar in pre-hospital medicine working for the Helicopter Emergency Medical Team (HEMS) in Kent. She has been involved in expedition and remote  medicine for the last 8 years, providing medical cover for all extremes of environments, including developing and leading the medical cover for a desert ultra marathon in Namibia. Other expeditions have included treks through the jungles of Belize and Borneo; adventure races across Costa Rica, Namibia and Nepal and dog sledding across Northern Norway  - as well as MSF's missions, her first of which is to Sri Lanka.

Amy is involved extensively in the teaching of expedition and remote medicine and took over as Medical Director of Expedition & Wilderness Medicine in November 2011. Amy completed the Diploma of Tropical Medicine in 2006, has a European Masters in Disaster Medicine and is en route to gaining a Post Graduate Certificate in Aeromedical Retrieval.

Irish-born Catherine did a performing arts degree in New York and Dublin before moving to the UK to work at the British Medical Journal 16 years ago.

Catherine has the adrenalin gene, she enjoys fencing, snowboarding, scuba diving and horse riding.  She has backpacked solo around Africa and spent Christmas Day one year bungee jumping off Victoria Falls. She has also been involved in an dog sledding expedition in Arctic Norway.

Catherine is your main point of contact for Expedition and Wilderness Medicine course enquires.

David is a Hong Kong based entrepreneur who was raised in the former British colony. His activities are as diverse in their field as they are wide spread around the world; ranging from retailing in the Philippines, manufacturing in China and the UK, warehouse distribution in Europe and he also has interests in a drag racing team in Holland. David's retail business operating in the Philippines has shown tremendous growth since inception and has won numerous sales and marketing awards for its winning performance competing against similar retail companies throughout Asia and the Pacific - a successful business working proudly with the highly respected Philippine Tourism Authority.

Eight years ago, David invested in Douglas, a flagging 60 year old British equipment manufacturer which employs 130 people in Cheltenham and produces specialised aviation equipment. The company was turned around and featured on Top Gear in 2010 as well as in the James Bond film, 'Casino Royale'. Recently it was announced that Douglas has been awarded two prestigious Queen's Awards for Enterprise - one for Innovation and the other for Sales Growth.

David travels extensively for business and pleasure. He takes time out to visit remote locations in Tibet, Bhutan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, (he was there at the time of the tsunami and stayed to give assistance). He spends about a quarter of his time in Somerset looking for ways to promote Hong Kong and British industry, something which he looks at as a particular challenge.

David and Mark, founder of Expedition & Wilderness Medicine, have been friends for nearly 30 years and their mutual respect for one another allows them to share and bounce ideas off each other- thanks to their diverse backgrounds and interests they're able to look at these ideas from opposing angles and explore as well as develop programs for the greater good.

David is married to his childhood friend Cara, has two teenage children from his first marriage and they have two dogs and two cats.

Luanne is a board-certified emergency physician and Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine who practices in her hometown of Bozeman, Montana. She is a past president of the Wilderness Medical Society, and is the medical director for Yellowstone National Park and Midway-Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. 

Luanne has worked as a volunteer physician in Nepal for the Himalayan Rescue Association (USA) since 1999, and in 2003, she founded the first-ever medical clinic at Mount Everest base camp, which she continues to direct and staff every spring climbing season, along with heading up Expedition & Wilderness Medicine's Mountain Medicine medical training course in Nepal's Khumbu Valley.

Mountain Medicine course

Mark is the founding director of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine and Across the Divide Expeditions and helped in the setting up of the orginal Expemed course established by Dr Stephen Hearns. A Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, Mark has been involved with expeditions for over 27 years and has led and organised expeditions to all of the world's continents, both in desert  and marine environments but also in both polar regions, at altitude and in the world's most remote corners.  Mark is also an award winning photographer with images regularly published in the Sunday Times and Telegraph and National Geographic.

Nick joins the Expedition Medicine team in the role of University Liaison which was created to develop interest and access to this exciting specialty for university students studying healthcare, and who might wish to practice medical care in remote or challenging natural environments.

He is currently in his 2nd year of graduate medical school at the University of Southampton. Prior to this Nick worked as an analyst for an international health care consulting company, Sg2, in London  where he examined different qualitative and quantitative trends in health care in the UK and abroad.

Nick however found his interest for extreme medicine during his Doctoral research at the University of Oxford. Here he studied the effect of different types of diet on heart and skeletal muscle energetics – a project funded by the US military who wanted to improve the long term physical and mental endurance capabilities of their combatants in the field. Whilst at Oxford, apart from juggling VIII rowing with his PhD, Nick was involved with the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Research Project and helped collect magnetic resonance imaging data of summit climbers’ heart and skeletal muscles before and after the ascent. This was in order to monitor adaptations in the body to high altitude (and transfer this knowledge into the intensive care setting where patients often struggle with low oxygen utilisation). He was also lucky enough to be one of those who trekked up to Everest Base Camp. Nick’s first degree was in Exercise and Sports Science at the University of Exeter, for which he gained a 1st class BSc with Hons.

Currently Nick is supporting a 4 man ocean rowing crew that are looking to break the world record for the fasted 4 person crew to row across the Indian Ocean in 2011. He is not only training them to row but coordinating physiological and cognitive research on them during the race. This allows him to combine his interest of how humans cope under extreme physical and mental stress with rowing!

Sean is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was the first person in the UK to become a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine. He has been involved in a wide variety of expeditions over the last 20 years. During this time he has trekked across the Darien Gap and the Thar Desert; worked as a trekking guide and Chief Medic for Raleigh International in Namibia and Zimbabwe; a trauma medic in Columbia; a ski field doctor in New Zealand and spent a season in the Antarctica for ALE.

In 2004 he became a medical consultant to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and works throughout the Middle East. Since 1998 he has worked for Across the Divide Expeditions as medic and expedition medicine advisor, providing medical cover on expeditions in 21 different countries. In 2002, he co-founded Expedition and Wilderness Medicine, which seeks to provide comprehensive training for medical professionals working as expedition medical officers in a variety extreme and remote environments.