Professor Daqing Ma, MD, PhD, FRCA, MAE, is the British Oxygen Company (BOC) Chair of Anaesthesia and Head of Anaesthesia in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College, London; formerly, he held the Macintosh Professor conferred by the Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) for the period from 2014 to 2016. Professor Ma pioneered research into the brain- and kidney-protective properties of the noble gases, xenon and argon, and has maintained his world-renowned status in that field. Professor Ma’s seminal findings provided the foundation for clinical trials addressing the role of xenon for acute ongoing neurological injury in both neonates (hypoxia-ischaemia encephalopathy) and adults (post-cardiac arrest syndrome). Based upon Professor Ma’s research into the molecular mechanisms for the cytoprotective actions of xenon and argon, the use of these gases by competitive athletes are now prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). In recent years, his scholarly activities have extended to oncology, where he was the first to discover that general anaesthetics that are used for cancer surgery can modulate cancer behaviour through the elaboration of hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha (HIF-1α). Professor Ma has also led investigations in the mechanisms for neurocognitive disorders after surgery in the elderly that recently culminated in a large RCT demonstrating the efficacy and safety of a peri-operative interventional strategy. These accomplishments provide evidence that Professor Ma’s impactful preclinical research has now transformed patient care in the perioperative and intensive care of surgical patients. Using the objective indicators of the H index 58 (Web of Science) and 70 (Google Scholar), and citations (more than 17,000), Professor Ma has impacted surgical sciences in a profound manner.