
Andreas Demetriades – President
Torstein Meling – President Elect
Andreas Demetriades – President
Torstein Meling – President Elect
Karl Schaller is Professor and chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the Geneva University Medical Center and Faculty of Medicine since 2007. He received his pregraduate training at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, andpursued his postgraduate career in academic neurosurgery in Duisburg and in Bonn, Germany. His main surgical and research interests concern neurovascular surgery, the treatment of epilepsy, and surgery of brain tumors. He receivesfunding for the development of intra-operative monitoring and imaging technology, and for clinical neurovascular research. Currently, he is serving on the editorial or advisory board of several neurosurgical and neurological journals,e.g. Acta Neurochirurgica, Neurochirurgie, Neurosurgical Review, Neurosurgery, World Neurosurgery, and others. He has a long history of commitment to the EANS – first as a trainee, then as faculty – and he chaired the individual membership committee from 2010-2014 and the Training committee from 2015-2017. He is a cofounder of the SFITS (Swiss Foundation for Innovation and Training in Surgery), a dedicated institute for surgical technology and training.
I was born in 1964 in Konstanz, located near the Swiss border on the shores of Lake Constance, one of the largest lakes in Europe. The captivating interplay of colors between the sky, water, vineyards, and mountains in the pre-alpine region of this area, situated at the convergence of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, has always left a profound impression on me. These formative years unfolded during the era of the Cold War, and consequently, I grew up in the French Sector of a still-divided Germany.
Later, my family and I relocated to Nuremberg and then close to Frankfurt, both of which were situated within the American sector. These moves brought me into regular interaction with both US military personnel and civilians. Although I initially had a limited interest in history, its presence was inescapable. During the period when I achieved my Abitur (equivalent to baccalaureate), intense debates raged across Germany and Europe concerning the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles—Pershings by NATO in Western Germany and SS20s by the Warsaw Pact in East Germany. The realization that the use of such weaponry, with its few hundred kilometers of range, could potentially reduce Germany to ashes prompted me to choose civil service at the regional hospital in Reutlingen, rather than fulfilling the mandatory military draft.