Matt Dawson is a Knee Surgeon who specialises in sports injuries and degenerative conditions affecting the knee. He is a leading authority on osteotomy and Joint Preservation surgery in the UK and Europe.

Having completed his Orthopaedic training in London and a Sports Knee Fellowship in Dublin, Mr Dawson joined North Cumbria University Hospital in 2001.

Mr Dawson performs a wide range of knee procedures including arthroscopy, femoral and tibial osteotomy, total and partial knee replacement, articular cartilage surgery, single and multiple ligament reconstruction, patella realignment and stabilisation and a range of combined complex procedures for deformity and instability. Mr Dawson has developed one of the largest UK practices in osteotomy with over 400 cases to date.

Mr Dawson believes in the principle of joint preservation in order to prolong knee activity and knee function to the highest level. His philosophy is to individually assess patients with the appreciation that alignment and stability of the knee are the bedrock to successful knee function and successful surgery.

Mr Dawson is committed to the education of healthcare professionals. He hosts a successful fellowship in Osteotomy and Knee surgery at North Cumbria University Hospital and lectures locally, nationally, and internationally. He has published in peer-reviewed journals on the subject of osteotomy. He is one of two UK members on the ESSKA osteotomy committee.

In June 2015 Mr Dawson launched the annual Northern Osteotomy Masterclass. This acclaimed course attracts experts from around the globe and provides high-quality training for consultants and the surgeons of tomorrow. He is a co-convenor of the Basingstoke Osteotomy Masterclass and founder member and committee member of UKKOR, the world’s first national osteotomy registry.

Mr Dawson is working at the leading edge of knee osteotomy surgery with device technologies, surgical applications, and teaching techniques. He is a driver in several research projects in the field. Currently Mr Dawson is collaborating with a leading American company and European colleagues with a groundbreaking technology aimed at increasing accuracy of osteotomy surgery. This innovative technology permits correction of alignment to occur under precise post-operative control using a magnetic remote control device. Mr Dawson is the first UK surgeon to perform this surgery.

Mr Dawson undertakes his NHS practice at the North Cumbria University Hospital and consults privately in Carlisle, at The Cumbrian Clinic, Whitehaven and at BMI Hospital in Lancaster.

David Elson is consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Gateshead. He was a trainee in the Northern Deanery and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

He completed knee surgery fellowships in both Cardiff and Hampshire and has worked for Matt Dawson, Chris Wilson, Mike Risebury and Adrian Wilson (all faculty members) which puts him in a unique position to comment on the results from these osteotomy centres.

He strongly believes that the techniques of knee osteotomy should be refined in light of patient outcomes and to this aim he has been driving the United Kingdom Knee Osteotomy Registry (www.ukkor.co.uk). This is an initiative designed to capture meaningful outcome data which should influence future surgical techniques in years to come.

He has several publications in the field of knee surgery and has presented at national and international conferences. He has aspirations to improve the message about knee osteotomy as a highly successful surgery.

Raghbir graduated from St George’s Hospital Medical School in 2006 and completed his higher surgical training in the South East London region.

Following his training, he went on to refine his skills in knee surgery with a fellowship under the tutelage of Professor Wilson, Mr Risebury and Mr Yasen. This fellowship allowed him to develop a keen interest in all aspects of osteotomy surgery, cartilage preservation, arthroscopic ligament reconstructions, partial and total knee arthroplasty surgery. He has a particular interest in managing arthritis in younger patients and is a Consultant in Knee Surgery at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital London.

Raghbir has published in all aspects of knee surgery and presented both nationally and internationally. He is an honorary lecturer at Winchester University and runs educational courses for higher orthopaedic surgical trainees in London.

Kristian Kley completed his medical training at Hannover Medical School in 2006 and then started a residency in orthopaedic trauma in Hannover with Prof Philipp Lobenhoffer. He is now working as fellow in a group practice in Hannover (Gelenkchirurgie Orthopädie Hannover) with Prof. Lobenhoffer.

Kristian Kley early developed a strong interest in osteotomy around the knee. He is an active member of the Hannover team treating 300 patients per year with osteotomy around the knee and developing new techniques and instruments to ease these procedures.

He has been active on national and international meetings and is also guest member of the Joint Preservation Expert Group of AO Foundation. Kristian Kley has developed unique techniques of minimal-invasive osteotomy of femur and tibia which are now used clinically in Hannover on a regular basis.

Matthieu Ollivier is an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Institute for Locomotion at Sainte Marguerite’s Hospital and an assistant professor of anatomy at the Medical University in Marseille.

Matthieu has studied in Marseille, Paris, Las Vegas and Grenoble, gaining a PhD in Biomechanics from the Institute of Human Movement Science in Marseille. He has won several prestigious awards including Best Research Paper (Paris, 2015) and Best Research Protocol (Grenoble, 2016) from the French Society of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the AAHKS John Insall Award (Las Vegas, 2015).

Matthieu’s research interests include ACL using quadriceps tendon, meniscal allografts, mechanics of the hip labrum, anterolateral ligament reconstruction and alignment in total knee arthroscopy. He has published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed publications and contributed to 18 medical books. He presents regularly at both national and international meetings.

Steffen Schröeter studied medicine in Tübingen (Germany). He trained in Friedrichshafen (Germany) 2003-2006. He wrote his doctoral thesis on biomechanical properties of human cancellous bone after different sterilization methods in 2005.

Since his stay with Alex Staubli in 2002 in Luzern he was fascinated in osteotomies. After he moved 2007 to the BG Traumacenter Tübingen, University of Tübingen, he started with different research projects around osteotomies and digital planning. He became specialist in Trauma and Orthopedics 2010. In 2013 he was for an observationship in the Harborview Medical Center, Seattle (USA) and he became specialist in special Trauma in 2014.

He is member in the AO TK Joint Preservation and Osteotomy Expert Group since 2011. Since 2014 he is consultant in the department of Sportstrauma and Arthroscopy of the BG Traumacenter Tübingen (University of Tübingen). Deformity correction includes in his department varus, valgus, rotational correction and additional limb lengthening. He was involved in many national and international osteotomy courses as faculty.

Dr. Konrad Slynarski completed his MD and Ph.D. degrees at The Medical University of Warsaw, Poland, and completed research fellowships at Case Western University in Cleveland, USA, with Arnold Caplan on Mesenchymal Stem Cells – based cartilage repair (funded by the Polish-American Kosciuszko Foundation). He subsequently completed a knee fellowship with Dr. Rene Verdonk, Belgium.

He was a principal investigator in several comprehensive clinical studies. He works on development and improvement of knee joint preservation procedures, including iBalance osteotomy and cell-based therapies for cartilage repair.

He organized several symposia and courses in the field of cartilage repair, including Warsaw ICRS World Congress in 2007, Polish Arthroscopic Society Congresses and Warsaw Joint Preservation Congress in 2013, 2015 and 2016. Dr. Konrad Slynarski is currently Head of private sports medicine center, LEKMED Warsaw, Poland.

Professor Wilson is the clinical lead for knee surgery at the North Hampshire Hospital, Basingstoke in the UK.

He qualified with a BSc in Biochemistry from Manchester University in 1989 and then went on to study medicine at St Bartholomew’s medical school, graduating in 1994. He did his fellowship in Sports Medicine at the Brisbane Orthopaedic Centre with Peter Myers in 2004.

Since becoming a consultant he has developed a specialist interest in knee preservation surgery particularly focusing on complex ligament and osteotomy surgery.

He has helped to develop the instruments and surgical technique for a number of surgical procedures. He is particularly well known for his work on the All Inside ACL and PCL surgical technique and has presented and published extensively on these procedures.

He has also helped to number of new surgical techniques for ACL and PCL surgery helping to pioneer the “All Inside Technique”. He has also developed a number of other surgical techniques including a technique for ACL repair.

Professor Wilson was part of the collaborative that set up UKKOR the first dedicated national database for osteotomy surgery. He has developed a number of instruments for osteotomy surgery and pioneered a minimally invasive technique for High Tibial Osteotomy Surgery. He co-founded the Basingstoke Osteotomy Masterclass in 2007. Professor Wilson is also a member of the ESSKA osteotomy group and his centre is a recognized centre for the ESSKA Osteotomy travelling fellows.

He frequently has international and UK visitors to observe both Osteotomy and ligament surgery.

Professor Wilson is a member of the ESSKA Academy editorial board and is a visiting Professor to the department of Sport & Exercise at Winchester University.

Ronald van Heerwaarden headed the Limb Reconstruction Center and the Limb Deformity Reconstruction Units of the Sint MaartensClinics in the Netherlands until 2016. He has been working as a consultant for osteotomies in the International Knee and joint Centre in Abu Dhabi since 2015 and in 2016 he moved to the new Centre for Deformity Correction and Joint Preserving Surgery in Kliniek ViaSana, Mill, the Netherlands. In 2019 he started as a consultant at the London Knee Osteotomy Centre of the Wellington and Portland Hospitals in London.

He was appointed Chairman of the ESSKA Osteotomy Committee in February 2016 and currently serves as Vice-Chairman.

In the past decade, until August 2014, he was a member of the AO Knee expert group which is responsible for development of new osteotomy techniques, osteotomy instruments (e.g. sawguides) and the TomoFix plates. He has performed research projects on conservative treatments of monocompartmental OA and surgical treatments with osteotomies at different centres in Europe.

In recent years he was a co-editor with René Marti on the book Osteotomies for Posttraumatic Deformities and a co-editor of the book Osteotomies around the knee together with Philipp Lobenhoffer, Alex Staubli and Roland Jakob as well as a co-editor for a German book on osteotomies around the knee which was published in a second edition in 2014. For these books he produced 17 chapters and 9 case presentations. He was a co-editor of the KSSTA januari 2013 special issue on Osteotomies around the Knee. Starting from 2004 he has authored or co-authored more than 90 articles on deformity analysis, osteotomies around the knees and joint preserving surgery. He has been an invited speaker at osteotomy meetings all over the world.