Writing. Learning. Healing.
About the author
Although I often get recognised as a surgeon first, above all, I find myself a family man. Together with my wife María, who is a palliative care physician, we have two daughters. They mean the world to us.
I have always been fascinated by medicine and surgery involving children, but I did not quite understand its magnitude and importance until I became a father myself.
I was born in Germany in a town called Essen and grew up both in my home country and the United States of America.
When I was five years old, my father took a job in the oil business in Texas, which is why the whole family went to live in Houston. There, I would later on complete part of my high school diploma. After a year of working as a nurse assistant in a German hospital in the surgical ward, I got accepted into Munich’s prestigious medical school. I completed my medical studies there, with stints in Spain and the United States of America. In Spain, I met my wife. In the United States, I completed my surgical clerkships at the Texas Medical Center and my internal medicine clerkship at Harvard Medical School in Boston and finally graduated medical school.
After graduating from medical school, I completed a surgical internship with the University of Texas at Houston and a pediatric surgery residency with the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. Later, I completed a pediatric surgery fellowship with Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham, and an abdominal organ transplantation fellowship with Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Through this training, I certified by the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) for both liver and kidney transplantation as well as hepatobiliary surgery. The international perspective I was able to gain through my training influenced me most as a person and did the same for the book.
Along with my curiosity in the field of pediatric surgery in the Western world, I have long developed a keen academic interest in promoting the surgical care of children in Africa. As one working member of the project JimmaChild, I was privileged to engage in the education and training of pediatric surgeons in Ethiopia. An entire chapter in the book addresses the unique situation of surgery of children in low- and middle-income countries, which is where most children in the world live at this moment in history.
All the while, I earned a Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. My main research focus is on pediatric cancer and its interaction with the human immune system. Having had the privilege to engage in research along with my surgical training has been enormously rewarding, both personally and professionally. This aspect, and what opportunities and limitations current medical research bring into the specialty of pediatric surgery, has heavily influenced my writing and is found throughout various chapters in the book.
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