W. Wolfgang Fleischhacker

Walter Wolfgang Fleischhacker (born 29 April 1953, Baden bei Wien) is an Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Previously professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of Innsbruck, he was appointed president of the university on 1 October 2017. He held this office until 30 September 2025.

Career

Fleischhacker studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck, encompassing clinical clerkships at the Landeskrankenhaus Salzburg and Bispebjerg Hospital in Kopenhagen. He received his MD in 1978 from Innsbruck University and completed his residency training at the departments of psychiatry and neurology at the same institution. In 1987, he was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant and spent 18 months as a research fellow at the Department of Psychiatric Research of Hillside Hospital, a teaching hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. After his return to Innsbruck, he was promoted to associate professor of psychiatry based on his work on the pharmacoepidemiology of benzodiazepines.

In 1992, he became a board-certified behavioral psychotherapist. His promotion to full professor at the newly founded Clinical Division of Biological Psychiatry of the Medical Faculty followed in 1993. Between 1999 and 2003 he served as acting director of the Institute for Professional Communication and Psychotherapy at Innsbruck's Leopold Franzens University. In 2004 the medical faculty of the University of Innsbruck became an independent, autonomous new institution: The Medical University of Innsbruck. During this restructuring and transition process, Wolfgang Fleischhacker held various positions in the Department of Psychiatry, among these, he was managing director of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics from 2008 to 2017. In May 2017, he was elected president of the Medical University of Innsbruck. He held this office until 30 September 2025. Honorary member of the Austrian Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (2025)

Fleischhacker advocates the necessity of best-practice comprehensive care models for the long-term treatment of schizophrenia, with continuous antipsychotic medication as a basis for these efforts.