ESCRS Heritage Lecture 2020

Dr. Theo Seiler, born in Ravensburg, Germany, Studied medicine, mathematics and physics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. His ophthalmic clinical training started in 1981 and he became professor of ophthalmology in 1990. In 1992 he took the position as Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Dresden, Germany.

In 2000 he moved to Switzerland becoming the Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology of the University of Zurich and in 2002 he founded the IROC and continued to be professor at the University of Zurich.

World-wide he was the first who used surface coils in MRI, the excimer laser in ophthalmology and holmium laser for keratoplasty. He invented the corneal cross-linking (CXL) in 1995 and developed the first wavefront-guided excimer laser treatment of the cornea in 1999. He discovered several clinical identities like iatrogenic keratectasia after LASIK and provided a treatment for this disease (CXL). Currently he is working on improvement of the cross-linking procedure in turns of better efficacy and reliability.

He has earned many awards from all over the world including the ESCRS Ridley Medal Lecture, ASCRS Binkhorst Award, the Barraquer-Award and the Senior Achievement Award of the AAO and was selected in 2014 to be the most influential ophthalmologist of the world (The Ophthalmologist).

View ESCRS Heritage Lecture 2020 here