Omer Dzemali

Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the University Hospital Zurich and Head of the Zurich Cardiac Surgery Alliance, which brings together the University Hospital Zurich, Stadtspital Zurich and Kantonsspital St. Gallen into one of the five largest public cardiac surgery centres in Europe, performing close to 2,000 primary procedures a year. He is also Chief of Cardiac Surgery at HOCH Health Ostschweiz in St. Gallen.

He studied medicine in Sarajevo and Mainz and completed his surgical training at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he obtained board certification in cardiac surgery and habilitated in 2009 on surgical treatment options in patients with impaired ventricular function. He moved to Zurich in the same year, became Head of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Stadtspital Triemli in 2018 and took over the directorship at the University Hospital Zurich in 2022. He holds the venia legendi of the University of Zurich for cardiac and thoracic surgery and is a full professor at the State University of Tetova, which also awarded him an honorary doctorate.

His clinical and academic work centres on minimally invasive and robotic cardiac surgery, with the Alliance now performing 99 percent of mitral and more than 80 percent of aortic procedures through minimally invasive access. He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles on minimally invasive valve and coronary surgery, aortic disease and transcatheter therapies, heart failure and mechanical support, as well as on cardiometabolic and digital health topics. He collaborates with the Soft Robotics group at ETH Zurich on surgical robotics and bioengineered cardiac tissue. He serves as Secretary of the Swiss Society of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery and holds several roles within EACTS and DGTHG working groups.