The Bangladeshi Doctors' UK National Conference 2026

Dr Ayisha Ashmore (MBBS, MPH, MRCOG) is an Obstetrics and Gynaecology registrar and Research Fellow at the Derby Gynaecological Cancer Centre and the University of Nottingham, where she is undertaking doctoral research in gynaecological oncology.

She has a strong interest in healthcare leadership and policy, having completed the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellowship with the Care Quality Commission and NHS England. She is a Specialist Advisor to the CQC and has previously held honorary fellowships with NICE — contributing to national guidance including caesarean birth, endometriosis, ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage, and multiple pregnancy — and with the RCOG, where she worked within the COVID-19 in pregnancy guidance cell.

At the conference she sets out how she built the experience and skills that put her in a position to apply for — and win — national leadership roles: where to find the fellowships, advisory posts and national guideline work that are genuinely open to trainees, what each one adds to your case, and the steps you can follow to do the same.

Outside medicine, Ayisha enjoys travelling, walking her dogs, and spending time with her husband and daughter.

Miss Ashrafun Nessa FRCS is a Consultant in Breast Surgery at Nottingham University Hospitals and Vice Chair of The Mammary Fold, the national association representing breast surgery trainees across the UK.

She arrived in the UK as an international medical graduate and began in a non-training post, moved into the general surgery training programme, and went on to consultant practice and a national leadership role in her specialty.

At the conference she sets that route out in full: how she secured her first post, what turned it into a training number, the experience and skills she built at each stage and how she built them, and how she reached a national position — with the concrete steps you can follow.

Miss Sifat Zareen Khan MRCS is Education & Training Lead for The ROUX Group, the national association for upper-gastrointestinal surgery trainees.

She came to the UK as an international medical graduate and built her career here from her first NHS post, through the training programme, to a national education leadership role.

Her talk maps that journey step by step — the skills she acquired at each stage and exactly how she acquired them, how she found and won the roles that counted, and why education leadership in particular is an unusually open door — with the steps you can follow to do the same.

Risa Abedeen is the founder of Risa London, which makes ring-holder necklaces that keep surgeons’ rings safe when they scrub in — a small, specific problem that every operating theatre has and nobody had solved properly.

She will talk about the part of entrepreneurship that rarely makes it into the story: identifying a real unmet need, getting a first product physically made, and building a brand around it while the day job continues.

Dr Faz Chowdhury is Founder and Chief Executive of Nemaura Medical and the creator of sugarBEAT, a non-invasive continuous glucose monitor that reads glucose through the skin without a needle. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford in nanomedicine and drug delivery, and a Master’s in Microsystems and Nanotechnology from Cranfield University.

Across a career spanning more than two decades in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical technology, he has become a leading authority in drug delivery, with over 120 granted and pending patents across nano- and microscale platforms. His ventures have tackled chronic disease management, non-invasive diagnostics and vaccine delivery, and he has authored textbook chapters on nanobiosciences for Wiley and Elsevier.

As a serial entrepreneur he has raised over $85 million in non-dilutive grants, equity and debt financing, and took a company to a Nasdaq listing that reached over $1.2 billion in market capitalisation at its peak.

His is the rare case of a scientist who took a laboratory idea all the way to a listed company and a regulated medical device. He will cover what that actually takes: the science, the money, the regulatory path, and the decisions that determine whether an idea becomes a product or just a paper.

Numayer Chowdhury is the founder of Mediware Ltd.

He speaks on building a healthcare business alongside clinical work — how to identify a viable commercial problem inside the NHS, and the practical mechanics of getting a company off the ground.

Bishow Bekhyat Karki — MBBS, MRCS (Eng), PGCert in Health Professions Education — is a surgical trainee in the NHS and works with The Suture Centre at Hull University Teaching Hospitals. His research interest is the use of engineering and machine learning to build surgical simulation that people can actually afford.

He saw that lifelike laparoscopic practice was locked behind commercial trainers costing thousands of pounds — out of reach for junior doctors in low- and middle-income countries and, often enough, in the UK too. So he built his own. LaApSi, the Laparoscopic Appendicectomy Simulation model, is cast in high-grade silicone from a 3D-printed anatomical mould: the rig costs £12.69 once, and every model after that costs 66 pence. Trainees rated it 90%, 96% and 92% for shape, size and texture against the real anatomy.

Then he went further. Working with electrical engineers at Tribhuvan University, he threaded fine insulated wires through the mesoappendix, appendicular artery and base of the appendix, wired to a microcontroller — so the model detects cutting errors and scores the trainee in real time. A complete automated assessment system, for under £20.

The work won the GlobalSurg Prize at the 2024 ASiT conference and was published in the Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology in 2025.

His talk is the part most success stories skip: the thinking that turns a frustration on the ward into a real object. Spotting the gap, building a rough first prototype, refining it through failure, and getting it into print and into other people’s hands — with the concrete steps you can follow to do the same.