We are excited to share that Professor Burkhard Dick has joined our Vision Health Advisory Board! With Burkhard’s excellent background, we look forward to having him part of the team and involved with upcoming research and standards development, expansion in Europe and collaboration with manufacturers. Please find full biography below. Welcome Burkhard!
Burkhard Dick, M.D., Ph.D Biography: Burkhard Dick is from a small town named 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 border town at the edge of the Iron Curtain to suddenly being in the country’s geographical center. 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 Care Center in 1997. Shortly after becoming a clinical professor in Mainz, the University of Bochum offered Burkhard Dick the position of head and director of its eye clinic and eye research center 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 5.000 eyes have been operated with that technology in Bochum. For his pioneering work, he has been awarded a number of honors 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 the Visionary Award of the American-European Congress of Ophthalmic Surgery (AECOS). He currently serves as the President of the German Society of Cataract, Refractive and Interventional Surgery (DGII). He is a regular lecturer at international meetings like the AAO, the ESCRS, the DOG, the DOC, the DGII.