Angels Stroke Heroes : Inspiring the Global Stroke Community

Dr Zana Mohamed is head of neurology at Iraq’s first diamond hospital. As well as leading the neurology department at Shar Teaching Hospital, he is assistant professor of clinical neurology at the College of Medicine at the University of Sulaimani in Kurdistan, and program director of neurology in the Kurdistan high council of medical specialties.  When we first interviewed Dr Zana in 2024 < https://www.angels-initiative.com/angels-community/stories/courage-stamina-dreams>, along with his team of young residents, his department had just won a WSO Angels gold award. The framed certificate, displayed in a hospital corridor, told the story of an eight-year battle to open Iraq’s first stroke unit. But it said even more.  As senior resident Dr Kaiwan Kawa explained:  “This award is proof that the doctors and nurses in Iraq have the capacity to achieve something great; it is a testimony to our energy and potential. The award gives us a standpoint, a hope. It means we can say to young people, look, we are capable. We are capable of making big changes and reaching our potential.” Shar Hospital reached diamond status in Q2 of 2026.   In this episode:  The journey to Iraq’s first stroke unit The unstoppable force of empathy The beautiful city of Sulaymani. Becoming a doctor The link between music and the brain Respecting every moment of life Find out more about the Angels Initiative:www.angels-initiative.com

NOTE: This podcast was recorded in Russian   The name, Asel Kerimkulova, is synonymous with better stroke care in Kyrgyzstan where she has systematically transformed the outlook for stroke patients by leading the creation and update of clinical treatment guidelines, establishing a nationwide stroke network, and enabling the first thrombolysis in 2025. A nominee in this year’s Spirit of Excellence Awards, neurologist and stroke specialist Dr Kerimkulova is the chief neurologist for the Ministry of Health of the Kyrgyz Republic, as well as Kyrgyzstan’s national coordinator for the European Stroke Organization, and an expert collaborator with the World Health Organization (WHO).  She also works alongside regional health and education experts to deploy public health campaigns like the FAST Heroes campaign, which educate communities on early stroke symptom detection. In this podcast, recorded in Maastricht in May 2026, Angels consultant Lev Prystupiuk engages Dr Kerimkulova in a wide-ranging conversation that offers insights into a decade of stroke care transformation in Kyrgyzstan.  In this episode:   The journey towards transformation Working with the WHO Working within the Ministry of Health Passion for FAST Heroes Setting the standard for stroke care Collaboration with neighboring countries and beyond Vision for the next 10 years Find out more about the Angels Initiative:www.angels-initiative.com

Dr Robert Mikulik has big ideas, and some of these are changing the future of healthcare. He is Professor of Neurology and the Director of the Stroke Research Programme at St. Anne’s University Hospital and Masaryk University in Brno, Chief of Physicians at Tomas Bata Hospital in Zlin, one of the co-founders of the ICRC, which is one of the biggest research infrastructural projects in the Czech Republic, and a founding member and long-serving chair of ESO-EAST, the program to improve stroke care in Central and Eastern European Countries.  He’s also the founder and coordinator of the stroke registry RES-Q, which, as he explains in this interview recorded in Maastricht, began as a tool to benchmark quality in Eastern Europe.  “When we started to discuss quality improvement in Eastern Europe, the first major barrier was that we had no data about what the quality was. So we realized that we needed to have some tool that would measure the quality. And that was the start of RES-Q. . .” Ten years later that tool has become sophisticated beyond expectations, Robert says. “RES-Q is not a registry anymore. It’s kind of like an intelligence platform that does a lot of automated analysis, you know, benchmarking and many other things. So the registry is only a small part.” Robert is the mastermind behind RES-Q+, an EU-funded project that promises to be a comprehensive solution for improving acute stroke care and life after stroke. It’s a revolutionary concept whose aims are to offer a fully automated tool for obtaining and processing data, evaluating that data, and providing feedback to care providers through artificial intelligence-based virtual assistants that precisely target problem areas. Finally, it will create virtual assistants for stroke patients that monitor their condition.  In this episode  Do awards change clinical practice? How RES-Q emerged out of ESO-EAST Growing beyond a registry The 3 barriers RES-Q + must overcome AI’s side effect Developing a new comprehensive center Quality improvement is more managerial than medical Medicine as “the most meaningful option” Why stroke neurology Introducing simulation training to stroke How big ideas arrive The next big idea What medicine and aviation have in common Find out more about the Angels Initiative:www.angels-initiative.com

Dr Apostolos Safouris is a distinguished vascular neurologist, chair of the ESO Stroke Unit Certification Committee, and a 2024 recipient of the Spirit of Excellence Award. He’s also an avid reader who told us in the past that the great texts from the history of humanity provided context for his work.  Shortly before this conversation took place in Maastricht, the setting for ESOC 2026, Apostolos announced on LinkedIn that having reached level 30 in Duolingo, he was now able to order food in Dutch. But then we discovered that learning Dutch in fact had nothing to do with eating in Maastricht. In a wide-ranging conversation, Apostolos talks about trading Athens for Brussels, parenting teenager daughters, progress towards getting stroke centers certified across Europe, and the end of the AI honeymoon. In some instances AI is being developed for functions humans can do more cheaply, he contends. He also talks about the potential for AI to tone down noise and counter bias in medicine, and concludes: "If you say I’m going to use AI to solve all the problems, you’re out of your mind. If you say I’m not using AI, well, you’ve been left behind in 2020."In this episode  Living and working in Belgium Raising teenagers Progress towards Stroke Unit certification in Europe Why the process matters AI and the role of doctors Reducing noise in medicine Building stroke networks Some recommended reading On Dr Safouris’s reading list Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) by the Israeli military historian Yuval Noah Harari Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995) by Daniel Dennett Peak Human: What We Can Learn from History's Greatest Civilisations (2025) by Johan Norberg The Maniac (2023), a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, by Benjamín LabatutFind out more about the Angels Initiative:www.angels-initiative.com

Dr Sandor Nardai is a cerebrovascular disease specialist and chief of the biggest thrombectomy centre in Hungary. As a licensed interventional cardiologist, neurologist and neurointerventionist, he is making an outsized contribution to stroke care in his country.  During a conversation recorded in Maastricht in May 2026, Sandor explained the “triple rule” that governs his career:  “From the very first part of my career, I really wanted to do the three jobs you need to do at the university clinic. So teaching, research, and healing patients. First was research. But then medicine really was interesting, and I thought that, well, if I do a medical degree, I could still be a researcher. And education is just fully integrated into it because it's a medical school.” Sandor is associate professor and the head of Department of Neurointervention at the Semmelweis University Center of Neurosurgery and Neurointervention in Budapest, Hungary.  It’s a great job to be in, he says.   In this episode:  Committing to the triple task of research, teaching and healing What cardiologists and neurologists can learn from each other Learning together on the job The importance of going abroad Why stroke is fascinating Why interventionists have to be team players Important questions research must answer Studying for an MBA A day in his life Leaving a legacy Find out more about the Angels Initiative:www.angels-initiative.com