Christiane Bruns received her doctorate in 1993. She completed her subsequent specialist training in surgery in Cologne at the Clinic for General, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery. From 1997 to 1999, she completed a two-year postdoctoral research stay at the Department of Cancer Biology at Texas A&M University. From 2003, she worked as a senior physician in Munich for ten years before accepting a position at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. From 2014, she was director of the Clinic for General, Visceral, and Vascular surgery at the University Hospital Magdeburg. In 2016, she accepted the call to Cologne, where she heads the clinic and polyclinic for general, visceral, and tumor surgery at the Cologne University Hospital. In her research, she deals with cancer of the esophagus, stomach, and pancreas, with tumor stem cells and tumor angiogenesis, with new vessel formation in tumors, and with the spread of and resistance to therapy of solid tumors. She is the Vice Dean for Structure and Strategy at the Medical Faculty at the University of Cologne. Bruns was newly elected to the Senate of the German Research Foundation (DFG) (place for Clinical Medicine II) on July 1, 2020. In August 2023, she was elected President of the German Society of Surgery (DGCH) for the 2023/24 term of office.
Thomas Schmidt is a specialist in general and visceral surgery, as well as special visceral surgery. He comes from Heidelberg University Hospital, where he was the first senior physician in clinic management and head of the section Oberer Gastrointestinal Tract, as well as deputy section head of “Oncological Surgery”. Since 2014, he has been head of a clinical working group with a focus on the esophagus and stomach. His scientific interest lies primarily in the microenvironment of tumors and metastases. To this end, he has headed the basic scientific working group “Tumor and Metastasis Microenvironment” since 2012 and received the renowned Ernst Jung Career Funding Prize for this work. He was appointed to the W2 professorship “Oncological Surgery” by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Cologne in 2021.
