Prof. Fortelny is an international expert in abdominal wall surgery. He is the former Head of the Hernia Centre at the General, Visceral and Oncological Surgical Department at the Wilhelminenspital in Vienna. 2015 he was appointed as chairholder of the General Surgery of the Medical Faculty at the Sigmund Freud Private University in Vienna. In 2003 he founded the Experimental Hernia Group at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Experimental and Clinical Traumatology in Vienna. Prof. Fortelny is the Past President of the Austrian Hernia Society and chaired the 39th Annual Meeting of the European Hernia Society (EHS) in Vienna in 2017. Prof.Fortelny is the founder of the “Austrian Hernia Days” which is the annual Hernia Congress in Austria. Since 2009 Prof.Fortelny is scientific board member of the Herniamed Registry. He is also board member of the EHS and Secretary General of the Advisory Board for Congresses of the EHS since 2019. Prof.Fortelny is the current Secretary General of the International Endo Hernia Society. As a member of the HerniaSurge Group he coauthored the International Guidelines for groin hernia management. Prof. Fortelny published more than 129 peer reviewed scientific articles (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Fortelny+R), several book chapters and recently “Offene Hernienchirurgie “ (Springer Verlag) as the editor. Currently he is member of the advisory board of the journal “Hernia”, editor of European Journal of Medical Research (EJMR), associate editor of Frontiers of Surgery and associate editor of the “International Journal of Abdominal Wall and Hernia Surgery”. Prof.Fortelny is in the top 10 of the worldwide experts in Abdominal Wall Surgery (https://expertscape.com/ex/hernia).