Margitta Seeck receives the Tissot Medal

Geneva-based neurologist Margitta Seeck has received the highest award from the Swiss League Against Epilepsy. As a long-standing member of the board, she has made an outstanding contribution to the care of people with epilepsy and to epileptological research in Switzerland.

(Geneva, November 2025) Prof. Dr. med. Margitta Seeck has been one of the few professors in Switzerland since 2015 to have specialised in epilepsy. Since 1995, she has headed the pre-surgical epilepsy diagnostics department at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), which she herself founded – one of the most important epilepsy centres in Switzerland. In 2007, she also took over as head of the EEG and Epileptology Unit at the polyclinic.

At her farewell symposium in Geneva on 5 November 2025, the Swiss Epilepsy League awarded her the Tissot Medal for her outstanding services to Swiss epileptology. “It is a great pleasure and honour for me to present this medal to Margitta Seeck,” said Lukas Imbach, President of the Epilepsy League, at the ceremony. “In addition to her outstanding research, her many years of voluntary work for the Epilepsy League and the Swiss Society for Clinical Neurophysiology, and her services to patients, she has also trained, inspired and supported numerous neurologists. Clinically, she has strengthened epilepsy surgery, among other things. Faster and better care after a first seizure is also very important to her.” A “first seizure” clinic, which, similar to a stroke unit, enables rapid evaluation of a first seizure, has been in operation at the HUG since 2019, in collaboration with the emergency department.

Margitta Seeck was a member of the Swiss Epilepsy League’s board from 2011 to 2022. She was involved in the research commission, the guidelines on fitness to drive with epilepsy, and the Epilepsy League’s specialist journals. She also designed the scientific programme for various congresses. She was an active member of the tri-national working group for pre-surgical epilepsy diagnostics and surgical epilepsy therapy. She also chaired the Swiss Society for Neurophysiology (SGKN) from 2009 to 2016 and, as editor-in-chief of Clinical Neurophysiology Practice, is a member of the board of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology (IFCN). She is an active member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In spring 2018, she received the Hans Berger Award for her research, which is only awarded every four years by the IFCN. Her list of publications includes over 200 papers in prestigious journals. She was also awarded the first Kahn Prize for Epilepsy Research in 1999. In addition, she is an honorary member of the Epilepsy League.

Margitta Seeck was born in Westphalia, Germany. She studied and worked in Munich, Boston and Berlin, among other places, before moving to Geneva in 1995.

The medal takes its name from Swiss physician and public health writer Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–1797), who published the first modern textbook on epilepsy, and has been awarded usually every two years since 2007.

Photo: Swiss League Against Epilepsy. High-resolution file available on request.