Johannes Schramm

Professor of Neurosurgery University of Bonn, Medical School, Bonn, Germany, Retired Chairman Department of Neurosurgery

Johannes Schramm, MD was born in a small village in East Germany on March 24, 1946. The family fled to West Germany in 1953. He studied medicine in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Manchester, U.K., wrote his dissertation and received his MD from the University of Heidelberg in 1972. After internship in West Berlin he did his residency at the university hospital of the Free University in West-Berlin. There he was introduced to microsurgery by Mario Brock and initiated to first scientific work by Takanori Fukushima who was a post-doctoral research fellow there.

After post-graduate training he did his Habilitation (equivalent to a Ph.D.) at the Free University of Berlin in 1981. In 1983 he became associate professor of neurosurgery and Vice-Chairman in Rudolf Fahlbusch’s Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 1989 he was appointed professor and chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Bonn where he retired in March 2012.

Dr. Schramm is the immediate past-president of the European Association of Neurosurgical Societies (EANS), having been the president of the EANS from 2007-2011. He is second vice-president of the World Federation of Neurological Surgeons and currently a member of the Joint Residency Advisory and Accreditation Committee of the EANS and the UEMS Section of Neurosurgery. He served as co-chairman of the working group “Neurophysiology and Neuromonitoring” of the German Society of Neurosurgery, as chairman of the Committee on Training and Continuing Medical Education and was delegate of the German Society of Neurosurgery in the Examination Committee and the Training Committee of the EANS. He served as chairman of the Research Committee of the EANS, then as vice-president of the EANS. He was vice-president of the German Society of Neurosurgery, president of the German Academy of Neurosurgery. He was president of the German language “Working group on presurgical evaluation and epilepsy surgery”. He served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German federal medical association and as deputy medical director of the University Hospital in Bonn and later served as a member of the supervisory board of the Bonn University Medical Center.

Dr. Schramm is a member of the German Society of Neurosurgery, Congress of Neurological Surgeons, American Association of Neurological Surgeons, German Academy of Neurosurgery, Academia Eurasiana Neurochirurgica.

Dr. Schramm’s clinical interests range from glioma surgery to AVMs and epilepsy surgery, as well as spine. His research initially focused on experimental cord i njury and evoked potentials. Clinically on development and introduction of intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring, later on gliomas, and surgery for drug-resistant epilepsy.

He was a van Wagenen lecturer at the AANS and was awarded the Travenol-Prize of the German Society. His research was funded by the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than two decades. His CV lists over 400 publications and over 50 book chapters. He currently is the editor of the book series “Advances and Technical Standards in Neurosurgery”.