In 2001 Professor Gunnar Kahlmeter was tasked to restructure EUCAST, and became the chair of the organization between 2002-2012, followed by a period first as clinical data co-ordinator and then as technical data co-ordinator until the end of 2025. He was also the founder of the EUCAST Development Lab and served as its director until 2024. Professor Kahlmeter also developed the EUCAST website into an internationally esteemed library on everything related to antimicrobial susceptibility testing. He served as its webmaster until 2025.
Professor Kahlmeter has played a pivotal role in international antimicrobial susceptibility testing and clinical breakpoint setting over a period of a quarter of a century, and he served in similar roles both for the Swedish Reference Group for Antibiotics and the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. He is known internationally for introducing concepts such as epidemiological cut-off values, devising the EUCAST public consultation process, revising the EUCAST definition of the I-category, introducing the concept of the area of technical uncertainty (ATU), and for developing rapid 4 – 6 hour phenotypic susceptibility testing directly from positive blood culture bottles.
Starting from 2026, he has stepped down from his duties as technical data co-ordinator in the EUCAST Steering Committee but will continue to contribute to the subcommittee for determining wild type MIC distributions and the setting of epidemiological cut-off values and to be part of the antimycobacterial subcommittee. We thank him wholeheartedly for his efforts for EUCAST for over a quarter of a century.