Dr Sam Parnia is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received his medical degree from the Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals (UMDS) of the University of London in 1995 and his PhD in cell biology from the University of Southampton in the UK in 2006. Dr. Parnia has trained extensively both in the UK and the USA where he completed his medical residency at the Universities of Southampton, UK and Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, USA. He completed his fellowship training in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of London and the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, USA in 2010. He joined the faculty at Stony Brook Medical Center as a member of the Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Division, of the Department of Medicine in 2010. Dr Parnia’s clinical and research areas of expertise are in cardiac arrest resuscitation, brain resuscitation and the cognitive sequelae of surviving cardiac arrest including near death experiences. He is director of Resuscitation Research at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, USA and an honorary fellow at Southampton University Hospital, UK. Dr Parnia currently directs a number of international studies focusing on the quality of brain resuscitation as well as the cognitive processes that occur during cardiac arrest. As well as publishing in leading scientific and medical peer reviewed journals he is also the author of two popular science books, Erasing Death (2013) and What Happens When We Die (2006).