Centre of Excellence for Eating Disorders Tübingen (KOMET)

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Address: Osianderstr. 5
72076 Tübingen


Phone number: +49 7071 29-86719


Fax number: 07071 29-4541


E-mail address: komet@​med.​uni-​tuebingen.​de


Hilde Bruch Lecture Award

The Hilde Bruch Lecture Award has been presented by KOMET to internationally renowned experts in eating disorder research and treatment since 2014. The nominated person is invited to give a public lecture at the University of Tübingen and provide a workshop for interested professionals of the University Hospital. The award is endowed with € 2,000.

Previous award winners

Previous award winners

  • 2014Prof. Ulrike Schmidt, King's College London
  • 2015Prof. Cynthia Bulik, University of North Carolina, Karolinska Institute Stockholm
  • 2016Prof. Janet Treasure, King's College London
  • 2017Prof. Fernando Fernandez-Aranda, University of Barcelona
  • 2018Prof. Beate Herpertz-Dahlmann, Aachen University Hospital
  • 2020Prof. Ruth Striegel Weissman, Wesleyan University, USA
  • 2022Prof. Daniel Le Grange, University of California, San Francisco

About the namesake Hilde Bruch

The award is named after the German (later American) physician Hilde Bruch (*1904; †1984), who is considered a globally important eating disorder expert.

Hilde Bruch was born in Dülken in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1904, the third of seven children in a Jewish family. She actually wanted to study mathematics after graduating from high school. However, her uncle, a doctor, convinced her that medicine offered better career opportunities for a Jewish woman. She studied at various German universities and graduated with a doctorate in medicine from the Albert Ludwig University in 1929.

Due to rising anti-Semitism, Hilde Bruch fled to England in 1933, before emigrating to the United States a year later. She worked in a children's hospital in New York and received her pediatrician's license in 1935. The year 1937 marked the beginning of her professional involvement with eating disorders, when she began obesity research in children. 

In the early 1940s, Hilde Bruch studied psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a private research university. She studied with several renowned psychiatrists while completing her psychoanalytic training. She then returned to New York, where she opened a psychoanalytic practice and taught at Colombia University.

Hilde Bruch remained active in research and authored countless professional articles that earned her a reputation as a luminary in the field of eating disorders. Her 1957 book The Importance of Overweight was one of the first to educate the public about the dangers of childhood obesity.

In 1959, Hilde Bruch was first appointed as a professor. She later accepted the position as Professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964. As anorexia became more widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, she became increasingly involved in the treatment of this disorder and soon became one of the world's leading authorities in the field.

Hilde Bruch lived the rest of her life in Houston, where she died in 1984.

Certificates and Associations

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