This special edition of the Journal of Tissue Viability provides a collection of scientific excellence led by the late Professor Dan L Bader. These papers form part of an academic career spanning over 40 years, working in collaboration with partners from around the world to provide novel insights into factors effecting tissue viability and technologies to promote wound prevention. Dan's great ambition was to translate his work from ‘bench to bedside’, using the highest quality experimental data [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]], computational modelling [9,10] and clinical studies [11,12] to create a step change in our understanding of factors which effect tissue health. This body of work originated from his career spanning several academic institutions including Queen Mary University London (QMUL), Technical University Eindhoven (TUE), and the University of Southampton (UoS).