Professor Chris Lavy

Professor of Orthopaedics and Tropical surgery, Oxford University, UK

Chris Lavy is professor of Orthopaedics and Tropical surgery at Oxford University and an elected Council member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He initially trained as a GP then saw the light and switched to orthopaedics and spinal surgery. In the heady 1980s there were few formal training programmes so he concentrated on training in beautiful cities and rotated through Norwich, Cambridge, Bath, Paris, Cape Town and Oxford, ending up in 1993 as consultant at University College Hospital in London. After three years of the bright lights in the West End he heard about Malawi, a country with 12 million people and no orthopaedic surgeons, so resigned and went there for 10 years working for a Christian mission, building 3 orthopaedic hospitals and setting up a regional College of Surgeons. Having snapped his Achilles tendon playing squash he has now moved to golf.