Dr M.J. Schultz (1965) has been named Professor of Experimental Intensive Care in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Amsterdam (AMC-UvA).

There is growing awareness that life-saving and organ-function replacement strategies and therapies in Intensive Care (IC) medicine may not be without risks. Life-threatening conditions often force intensivists to apply strategies and therapies that in themselves have the potential to be harmful, sometimes severely so. A typical example is mechanical ventilation. Mechanical ventilation not only increases the chance of pneumonia, it can also intensify, or even induce, sterile inflammation of the lungs. In the Laboratory of Experimental Intensive Care and Anesthesiology (L·E·I·C·A) and in the department of IC, current translational research conducted by Marcus Schultz focuses on lung injury caused by mechanical ventilation, i.e., ventilator-induced injury to lung cells and lung tissue, to the lungs as a complete organ and also to distant organs. In this research, Schultz studies and manipulates clotting and innate immunity. In doing so, he tests new mechanical ventilation strategies - several of them developed in the laboratory - for preventing or treating mechanical ventilation-induced lung injury.

Schultz believes that new strategies and therapies could significantly improve IC medicine, but only if these are indeed applied. Many insights with respect to effective care and best practices in IC medicine are not sufficiently applied: patients do not always receive care in accordance with the latest insights. Implementation is sometimes referred to as the final step in translational research. With implementation, the aim is to introduce the full range of strategies and therapies that have been proven to contribute to improved results. Schultz is carrying out implementation research in the department of IC of the Amsterdam Medical Center (AMC) in collaboration with a number of Dutch hospitals, as well as with hospitals in Southeast Asia. In several projects, he studies the implementation of complex and often expensive strategies or therapies in the AMC and other Dutch hospitals. In the less wealthy countries in Southeast Asia, however, he stresses the implementation of simple, often cheaper, care.

Since 1991, Schultz has held a number of positions in the AMC, where he was trained as an internist and later as an intensivist. In recent years, he worked as Senior University Lecturer and Head of Research in the department of IC of the AMC. In 2002 he earned his PhD for research into clotting and innate immunity in the lung during pneumonia. Schultz has authored numerous publications in various international journals and is an editor of Netherlands Journal of Critical Care and Netherlands Journal of Medicine. For his research on anticoagulant strategies during pneumonia, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded him a Veni grant in 2004. In 2006 the same organisation awarded him an Effectiveness grant for his research into implementation of strict glycemic control in critically ill patients.