Manu Malbrain

Manu Malbrain (1965) qualified as MD from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in
1991. He is married to Bieke Depré and they have 3 sons: Jacco, Milan and Luca. Since Oct
2017 he is Director of the Intensive Care Department at the University Hospital in Brussels
(UZB), Belgium and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacology at Vrije
Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Before he was director from 2002-2017 of the Medical and Surgical
ICU, the High Care Burn Unit and a hyperbaric oxygen chamber of the ZNA “Ziekenhuis
Netwerk Antwerpen”, Campus Stuivenberg/St-Erasmus in Antwerp, Belgium. He was medical
hospital director of the ZNA Stuivenberg and St-Erasmus hospitals from 2013-2017. He is a
critical care physician (1997) with a basic training in internal medicine (1996). He is actively
involved in the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) where he chaired the
Working group on abdominal problems (WGAP) within the POIC section (2009 -2013) and he
is member of the Scientific Subcommittee of the European Society of Anesthesiology (ESA).
He studied the effects of raised intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) in general ICU patients for the
last 20 years. He is the founding President and actual Treasurer of the Abdominal
Compartment Society (formerly known as World Society on Abdominal Compartment
Syndrome, WSACS, www.wsacs.org) and he co-chaired the previous 8 bi-annual WCACS
meetings since 2004. He is co-founder of the International Fluid Academy
(www.fluidacademy.org) and co-chaired the first 6 iFAD meetings since 2011. Besides IAP and
fluid management, his favourite topic is less invasive (hemodynamic) monitoring and he
enjoys his active involvement in (bedside) teaching and education of medical trainees and
students. In 2003 he was the first ESICM Chris Stoutenbeek Award winner in Amsterdam with
a study protocol on different intra-abdominal pressure measurement methods and he
successfully defended his PhD doctorate’s thesis in 2007 on the same topic (KU Leuven). He is
author and co-author of more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, reviews, editorials, book
chapters and even two complete books on ACS.