H. Burkhard Dick, M.D., Ph.D., FEBOS-CR
Burkhard Dick was born in a small town by the name of Brake in Northern Germany. After graduating from the local high school, he served for two years as a medical officer with Germany's NATO forces. He attended medical school at the University of Giessen, a city with a strong American presence during the Cold War, where he graduated in 1990, a year that saw German unification and changed Giessen's location where he began his residency in ophthalmology from bordertown at the edge of the Iron Curtain to suddenly being in the country's geographical centre.
Dick became head physician at the University Eye Hospital in 1995 before he moved to the Eye Hospital of the University of Mainz which bears the name of that city's greatest son, Johannes Gutenberg. Here he specialized in refractive and cataract surgery and became head of the hospital's Refractive Surgical Eye CareCenter in 1997. Shortly after becoming a clinical professor in Mainz, the University of Bochumoffered offered Burkhard Dick the position of head and director of its eye clinic and eye research centre which he accepted in 2006. Since then, the Bochum University Eye Clinic has become an internationally renowned institution with a constant output of highly ranked research papers and clinical studies, most of them published in the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery and the Journal of Refractive Surgery.
Burkhard Dick became one of the first ophthalmic surgeons in Europe to use a femtosecond laser in cataract surgery; to date almost 12,000 eyes have been operated with that technology in Bochum.
For his pioneering work, he has been awarded a number of honours like the Choyce Medal of the British Ophthalmological Society, the Gold Medal Award of the Australian Society for Cataract and Refractive Surgery, the Waring Medal of the Journal of Refractive Surgery and, most recently, the Visionary Award of the American-European Congress of Ophthalmic Surgery (AECOS).
He currently serves as the Treasurer of the German Society of Cataract, Refractive and Interventional Surgery (DGII) after being President of the DGII for four years (2016-2020). He is a regular lecturer at international meetings like the AAO, DOG, DOC, DGII, ESCRS, APAO and ASCRS and has instructed fellows in the University Eye Hospital Bochum from 44 different countries in state-of-the-art cataract, refractive, glaucoma and vitreoretinal surgery.
