Jiří Dvořák – New Team Member

Prof. Jiří Dvořák, MD

Emeritus Professor of Neurology at the University of Zurich, Senior Consultant to the Board of the Schulthess Clinic, Spine Unit, Zurich, Switzerland, and Co-Founder of the BDMS Wellness Clinic in Bangkok, Thailand. Prof. Dvořák served as Chief Medical Officer of FIFA and Chairman of the FIFA Medical Assessment and Research Centre (F-MARC) for 23 years (1994–2016), during which he was medically responsible for 6 FIFA Men’s World Cups, 5 FIFA Women’s World Cups, and 4 Football tournaments at the Olympic Games. Under his leadership, F-MARC transformed football medicine from a discipline of care into a globally coordinated instrument of public health, generating more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications and establishing evidence-based standards adopted by 211 FIFA member associations worldwide.

Prof. Dvořák received his medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1974, completed his postgraduate training in Physical Medicine, Rehabilitation, Manual Medicine and Neurology at the University of Bern, and undertook a visiting fellowship in Biomechanics at Yale University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Venia Legendi of the University of Zurich (1990) and appointed Professor of Neurology and Spinal Disorders at the University of Zurich in 1995.

Prof. Dvořák’s contribution to public health through sport is unparalleled in scope. As Chairman of F-MARC he conceived and led the development of the FIFA 11+ neuromuscular injury-prevention programme, shown across multiple randomised trials to reduce football injuries by up to 50% and adopted globally as a public-health warm-up standard for youth and adult athletes. He established the mandatory pre-competition cardiovascular screening protocol and the “11 Steps to prevent Sudden Cardiac Death” in football, introduced the standardised FIFA medical emergency bag, defined the international policies for high-altitude acclimatisation and mandatory cooling breaks in hot environments, and led the foundational research on athlete health during Ramadan. He launched the “Football for Health” / “11 for Health” school-based education initiative, implemented across 52 countries, using football’s global reach to combat both communicable and non-communicable diseases in children and adolescents, later adapted as “The 11 against Ebola” during the West African outbreak. He served as a member of the IOC Medical Group of the Summer Olympic Games (2004–2016) and of the WADA Health, Science and Research Committee and Foundation Board (2003–2016).

Prof. Dvořák has published 482 original papers and 18 textbooks (with translations and new editions), roughly half devoted to sports medicine, and is Senior Advisor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, former Deputy Editor of SPINE, and Co-Founder and Associate Editor of the European Spine Journal. He is Past President of the Spine Society of Europe (1999/2000), Honorary Member of EUROSPINE (2018), ISAKOS (2017), and the Czech Medical Academy (2018), and recipient of the 1999 Volvo Award for Spine Research and the 2025 ISSLS Wiltse Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the lead co-author of the 2022 book “Health Brings Wealth”.

Prof. Dvořák brings to the Global Health Span Extension Consortium three decades of experience translating evidence into globally scaled public-health interventions, and a research focus on the prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases across the life course, from adolescent athletes to older adults, extending the Consortium’s translational reach from clinical geroscience into population-level health promotion through physical activity and sport.