Professor Michael Solomon is a Consultant Surgeon and Academic Head of the Department of Colorectal Surgery at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and Clinical Professor of Surgery and Director of Colorectal Research, both for Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and the University of Sydney and is a past the President of the Colorectal Surgical Society of Australia & New Zealand (CSSANZ). He is currently a Board Member of the NSW State Cancer Institute. He recently was awarded the prestigious RPA Foundation Research Medal in 2014 being the first surgeon to be given this honour. Professor Solomon has extensive experience in clinical surgical research and has published over 250 papers and obtained over 12 million dollars in peer reviewed research grants. He is the Founding Director and Head of the Surgical Outcomes Research Centre (SOuRCe) at the University of Sydney since 2004 which was established as a multidisciplinary, academic research unit dedicated to the advancement of evidence-based surgical practice through the conduct of outcomes-orientated surgical research. Professor Solomon has supervised 38 Masters and Honours degrees as well as 5 completed PhD’s with a further 3 currently in progress. Professor Solomon was recently appointed in 2014 the inaugural Chairman of the Institute of Academic Surgery at RPA. This novel Institute focuses on enhancing academic surgery by fostering and mentoring academic careers, surgical education, social media, global health, current surgical research and most critically the future of surgery. Professor Solomon’s surgical expertise is in minimally and maximally invasive colorectal surgery with the foundation of a multi-disciplined complex pelvic surgery for advanced and recurrent malignancy unit, expertise in inflammatory bowel disease and pelvic floor disorders as well as laparoscopic colorectal surgery. His current research interests lie in developing maximally invasive techniques for advanced pelvic malignancy, clinical trials of minimally invasive colorectal surgery and the assessment and performance of randomised and alternative clinical trial designs for surgical operations.