Frank A. Flachskampf MD, PhD, FESC

Frank A. Flachskampf, MD, Ph.D., FESC, moved in 2010 from the University of Erlangen, Germany, to Uppsala University, Sweden, as a newly appointed professor of cardiology and cardiac imaging. He is a consultant (‘o¨verla¨kare’) in cardiology at the universityclinic ‘Akademiska sjukhuset’. Uppsala has the oldest university and university hospital in Scandinavia. The cardiology research group in Uppsala, led by Lars Wallentin and now Bertil Lindahl, is world-renowned for clinical research in ischaemic heart disease. In particular, has built exemplary clinical registries such as SWEDEHEART. Flachskampf is now trying to harness these local strengths for projects related to cardiac imaging. Flachskampf, a German-born in 1957 in Lisbon, Portugal, trained at the University of Aachen, under professors Effert and Hanrath, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on three-dimensional echocardiography in 1996, and became an internist and cardiologist. From 1988–to 89, with a Fellowship from the German research foundation, he pursued topics in the application of echocardiography related to valvular heart disease at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA, USA, in Arthur E. Weyman’s echocardiography laboratory. Returning to Aachen, he became a consultant and supervisor of the echo laboratory. He then moved to an Imaging and Invasive Fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic in 1997–98, where he worked in James D. Thomas’ and Eric Topol’s groups. From there, he returned to Germany as a consultant cardiologist at the university clinic of Erlangen (chief: Werner G. Daniel), where he continued working scientifically, mainly in cardiac imaging with topics ranging from stress echo to deformation imaging, but also in several other fields, such as ultrasound thrombolysis, cardiac intensive care, and even acupuncture. After a short stint as chief of cardiology at a private hospital in Hamburg (as he says, a decidedly low point in his career), he continued in Erlangen until 2010, when the opportunity arose to apply for a cardiology professorship in Uppsala, Sweden. In the European Society of Cardiology, he has been a long-time Board Member and is currently Treasurer of the European Association of Echocardiography; he also serves as an editorial board member of the European Journal of Echocardiography and in the Education Committee of the ESC. He remains fond of his overseas contacts as a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and member of the American Society of Echocardiography and on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography. Flachskampf is married and has three teenage children. He is a voracious reader of several languages and sees his own personal history as an example of fading borders and an expanding professional landscape.