Gustav Steinhoff initiated and leads the Reference and Translation Center for Cardiac Stem Cell Therapy (RTC) of the University Medical Center Rostock. He is known as an expert in the medical field of stem cell therapies and the first clinician to treat patients with intramyocardial transplantation of purified stem cells and is one of the pioneers of these new therapies. Besides his medical study at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Gustav Steinhoff performed research at the Baylor College in Houston, Texas. He has worked as a surgeon at the University of Kiel and the Medical School Hannover, where he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 1998. In 2000 he moved to the University of Rostock as a Director and Chairman of the Department of Cardiac Surgery where he continued his research on cardiac stem cell therapies and tissue engineering.