Gennarina Portella

Dr Portella is the Medical Division Coordinator at EMERGENCY, a humanitarian health organization providing high quality and free of charge medical and surgical care to the victims of war and poverty. In 2005, she began to work with EMERGENCY as an anaesthetist, and later as a medical coordinator, in Surgical Centres for war victims in Afghanistan. One of her leading contribution was to the EMERGENCY Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery, where she served for seven year as a medical coordinator and senior anaesthetist, setting up the basis of the training programme for young Sudanese doctors. In 2014, after the outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone, she coordinated and worked in the EMERGENCY Ebola treatment centre in Goderich. Currently, she is the Medical Division Coordinator at EMERGENCY, providing medical oversight for all EMERGENCY projects set in many countries. In the last year, she also coordinated the outbreak response group in the intensive care department of the COVID-19 Treatment Centre in Bergamo. In her carrier, she published many research papers on various topics, ranging from Rheumatic heart disease to Antimicrobial resistance and Intensive care.