Daniel Fudulu is a consultant senior lecturer in cardiac surgery at the Bristol Heart Institute, UK. He graduated from medical school (UMF Carol Davila Bucharest) in 2008, and he ranked top during the medical residency exam and entered a training programme in general thoracic surgery at the Romanian Institute of National Institute of Oncology, Bucharest, Romania. During this period, he co-authored a book, “The Pericardium”, that received the Romanian Academy of Sciences Prize, Medical Section – “Iuliu Hateiganu”. He left the Romanian residency training in 2010 and immigrated to the UK, where he started surgical training from scratch. He completed a 2-year UK Foundation Programme in Acute Medicine, General Surgery and Intensive Care Medicine followed by 2 year - Core Surgical Training Programme in Severn Deanery by rotating in Vascular Surgery, General Surgery and Cardiac Surgery. Ultimately, he passed the UK Member of the Royal College of Surgery Exam (MRCS) in 2014. He then worked as a clinical research fellow at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and was appointed UK National Trainee in Cardiac Surgery in August 2017 in the South-West Deanery (ST3 level). Throughout his cardiac surgery training, he was a clinical academic trainee because he was initially awarded an NIHR Academic Fellowship (ST3-ST5) and NIHR Clinical Lectureship  (ST6-ST8) allowing him dedicated research time. The University of Bristol awarded him a PhD by research on the “Characterisation of the stress response to heart surgery in children” in January 2020. This research used a novel subcutaneous sampling device to measure cortisol in neonates undergoing heart surgery and in-vitro experiments. His research outputs to date include 21 first-author publications in international peer-review journals and co-author of over 30 other papers. The Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK recently awarded him a Clinical Lecturer, Starter Granter. His basic research interest focused on understanding the systemic inflammatory response and stress (cortisol) response in children of various ages undergoing cardiac surgery, and in parallel, he undertook big-data research into several clinically relevant questions in adult cardiac surgery. His current research looks at the use of traditional statical approaches and machine learning techniques applied to routinely collected datasets and multi-omics data to predict short and long-term outcomes after cardiac surgery. He passed the exit exam – the Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons Exam (FRCS C-Th) in 2022 and was awarded a UK Certification of Completion of Training in Cardiothoracic Surgery in February 2024. He completed an International Fellowship in Advanced Cardiac Surgery in New Zealand and an observership in Australia, focusing on complex valvular surgery and multi-arterial aorta off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting. His subspecialty clinical interests include off-pump multilateral coronary revascularisation, minimally invasive coronary surgery and complex valve surgery (mitral valve, tricuspid and aortic valve surgery). His research interests include pragmatic RCTs in cardiac surgery and big data analytics for the prediction of outcomes following cardiac surgery. He was appointed as a substantive consultant cardiac surgeon and senior lecturer in January 2025 at the Bristol Heart Institute.