Meeting Presidents Through the Years
Each regional meeting was led by a host president — a senior figure from the host country who shaped that year's scientific programme. Their names form a useful map of where leadership in Asian neuro-oncology has resided.
Host presidents, 2002–2016
- 2002 — Prof. Yukitaka Ushio — Kumamoto, Japan
- 2003 — Prof. Jong-Hyun Kim — Seoul, Korea
- 2004 — Prof. Liang-Fu Zhou — Shanghai, China
- 2005 — Prof. Tai-Tong Wong — Taipei, Taiwan
- 2007 — Prof. Kaya Aksoy — Bursa, Turkey
- 2009 — Prof. Masao Matsutani — Saitama, Japan
- 2010 — Prof. Kyung Gi Cho — Suwon, Korea
- 2011 — Prof. Zhong-ping Chen — Suzhou, China
- 2012 — Prof. Ham-Min Tseng — Taipei, Taiwan
- 2013 — Prof. Rakesh Jalali — Mumbai, India
- 2014 — Prof. Turker Kilic — Istanbul, Turkey
- 2015 — Prof. Manuel Mariano — Manila, Philippines
- 2016 — Prof. Mark Rosenthal — Melbourne, Australia
What the list reveals
The rotation tells a quiet story of widening participation. The first hosts came from the founding countries — Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. As the network grew, leadership reached Turkey, then India, the Philippines and Australia. By design, hosting a meeting was both an honour and a responsibility: the host president set the scientific tone, invited international faculty, and welcomed colleagues from across the region.
How leadership rotated
In the regional model, the host president was typically the senior figure of the country staging that year's meeting. This arrangement tied leadership to hosting duties: taking on a meeting meant shaping its scientific programme, inviting international faculty, and representing the gathering publicly. Because hosting rotated, so did leadership, which kept any single country from dominating and gave emerging neuro-oncology communities a clear path to the front of the field. It is a quietly democratic structure, and an unusually effective one for a volunteer specialty spread across many borders.
A note on attribution
We list these names because the leadership of a scientific field is part of its public history, much as the directors of a film festival or the editors of a journal are. We do not publish private contact information. To see the meetings these presidents hosted, visit the chronology of meetings, and for how this rotation was formalized, see our explainer on society governance.