Kevin Fong

Biography

Professor Kevin Fong is a doctor and expert in high-performance teamwork under extreme pressure. He has flown as part of a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service crew, worked with NASA's human spaceflight programme, and served as National Clinical Adviser to NHS England's Covid-19 response. He explores the realities of working and leading under pressure and asks: how do the best teams and organisations succeed when plans fail and uncertainty reigns?

With over two decades working in high-risk, high-performance teams across medicine, aviation and spaceflight, Kevin explores those dealing with complex, unclear situations in his book Minute Six - How High Performance Teams Navigate the Unknown. Based on how often plans struggle to survive contact with reality, Kevin looks at how effective preparation should focus on what comes after that initial contact. The approach underpins his idea on resilience, decision-making and team performance. Through stories of critical emergencies, he reveals the counter-intuitive principles that enable teams to succeed against the odds, learn from failure, and perform again. These principles include distributed leadership, deference to expertise, graceful failure, embracing complexity, and maintaining human agency alongside technology. He suggests that when managing fast-moving threats in the face of uncertainty, it’s at the edge of potential chaos that high-performing teams show their strength.

Kevin is a consultant anaesthetist, and professor of public engagement and innovation in the Department of Science, Technology, Education and Public Policy at University College London. As well as specialising in intensive-care medicine, he holds degrees in astrophysics, medicine and engineering. He is departmental lead for major-incident planning at UCL Hospitals, and has worked extensively with NASA's human spaceflight programme. His work frequently combines his medical expertise with his knowledge of engineering, psychology and systems design.

As well as medical and academic work, Kevin is broadcaster, frequently appearing on TV and radio. He hosted the award-winning global hit podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, revealing overlooked moments and people behind the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. He also created and presented 16 Sunsets, a podcast series chronicling the dramatic history of NASA's Space Shuttle era through the voices of those who built and flew it. On television he’s presented and contributed to series including Extreme A&E, Space Shuttle: The Final Mission, To Boldly Go and Astronauts: Do You Have What it Takes. He has written and presented numerous editions of the BBC’s Horizon series, including We Need to Talk about Death, Cyber Attack, Back from the Dead, and How to Avoid Mistakes in Surgery. His BBC Radio 4 documentaries include Trauma Medicine: The Fight for Life and The NHS: Who Cares?, and he co-hosted The Artificial Human with Aleks Krotoski. In 2015 he delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

Kevin is also the author of Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body, which won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award. Drawing on his work with NASA, the European Space Agency and his background in extreme environment medicine, the book explores how the human body reacts to extremes and the scientific developments that have made survivable what would once have been lethal.

With expertise, warmth and natural storytelling, Kevin considers the complexity of performance and teamwork. From how teams operate and make critical decisions under pressure to addressing risk management, uncertainty, innovation, he explores the human aspects of technology and systems design. He examines how resilient organisations are developed, and the lessons in leadership and planning from emergency medicine, space, and major-incident preparation and response.