Gustav Steinhoff is an emeritus professor of cardiac surgery (since 2021) and former clinical director and professor of cardiac surgery (2000-2020) at the University Rostock. Since several years he is known as an expert in the medical field of stem cell therapies. He was the first clinician in 2001 to treat post-myocardial infarction patients in Phase I trial with intramyocardial transplantation of purified bone marrow stem cells and coronary bypass surgery and is one of the pioneers of these new therapies. Besides his medical study at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (1977-1984) Gustav Steinhoff performed research training at the Baylor College in Houston, Texas (1980) . He completed his thesis in 1987 and his residency training for General Surgery (1992), Vascular Surgery (1995), Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery (1997), and worked as a staff surgeon at the University of Kiel (1993-1996) and the Medical School Hannover (1996-2000), where he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 1998. In 2000 he was appointed as a full professor of cardiac surgery at the University of Rostock as a Director and Chairman of the Department of Cardiac Surgery. There he continued his research on cardiac stem cell therapies and tissue engineering, stem cell biology, nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, and systems medicine. After retirement in 2020 he is an emeritus professor of cardiac surgery at the University Medicine Rostock.