The 2026 John Wickham Award goes to Dr. Massimo Aldo Bocciardi of Milan. Dr. Bocciardi is Director Emeritus of the Urology Department at Niguarda Ca’ Granda Hospital in Milan and developed the Retzius-sparing prostatectomy technique. The Wickham Award is given every year to a surgeon who has made a significant contribution to robotic surgery.
Prof. Peter Wiklund, on behalf of the ERUS Awards Committee: “Dr. Bocciardi has a long history in urology, he started with paediatric urology, trained partly in France, he’s been at San Rafaele, and became head at Niguarda. There he led the largest robotic programme in Italy and maybe even in Europe at one point in time.”
“He developed the Retzius-sparing technique. He has a lot of followers, the technique is now also in the EAU Guidelines as an option. It remains a technique that causes discussion, some surgeons like it, some don’t. It’s a strictly robotic procedure, impossible to recreate in open or with laparoscopic, so making use of the unique possibilities of robotic surgery.” The first paper to describe the technique was published in European Urology in 2010.
“I’ve started using the technique myself, I like it, but it’s a difficult technique to learn. The development of this technique is the most important reason to award him the Wickham Award although he is an innovative surgeon in his own right, going back to his days as a paediatric surgeon.”
Dr. Bocciardi kept his acceptance speech short and urged young urologists to think outside of the box.
Wickham Award
Dr. Bocciardi is the eighth recipient of the ERUS’s Wickham Award and joins an impressive list of previous winners, going back to 2018. The most recent recipients are Prof. Joan Palou, Prof. Vito Pansadoro and Prof. Prokar Dasgupta. The award is given on an annual basis, honouring surgeons who have made a significant contribution to robotic surgery. The prize consists of a medal featuring an engraving of John Wickham’s likeness. No winner was announced in 2020 due to the virtual nature of ERUS20.
The award is named after John Wickham (1927-2017), a true pioneer of robotic surgery. Together with Prof. Brian Davies of Imperial College, Wickham developed and engineered the first robotic device in urological surgery named the PROBOT. Wickham used the PROBOT to perform the very first robotic procedure on the prostate in London in April of 1991. He coined the phrase “minimally-invasive surgery” to describe the future of the field. Mr. Wickham passed away in late 2017, at the age of 89.
