Professor Heusch graduated from the Universities of Düsseldorf and Bonn with an MD in 1979. He subsequently graduated with a PhD in cardiovascular physiology at the University of Düsseldorf in 1985. From 1985-1986 he was research cardiologist in the Division of Cardiology at the University of California, San Diego under Dr. John Ross Jr. From 1987-1989 he was Heisenberg Scholar in the Depts. of Physiology and Cardiology (Professor Franz Loogen) at the University of Düsseldorf. He currently is the Chair of the Department of Pathophysiology at the University of Essen Medical School, a position he has held since 1989, and chief scientific officer of the West German Heart and Vascular Center. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physiology in Mobile, Alabama, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Medical Academy of Nishnij Nowgorod, Russia and an Honorary Professorship from Tangshan Medical College, China. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London) since 2006 and a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2012. He is editor of Basic Research in Cardiology and serves on the editorial board of eminent journals, including Circulation Research (senior consulting editor), Journal of the American College of Cardiology (section editor), European Heart Journal, Cardiovascular Research, Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, and American Journal of Physiology. He was president of the European Section of the International Society for Heart Research (2002-2005) and the German Cardiac Society (2005-2007), and he has chaired the section of medicine of the German Research Foundation (2012-2016). He has received several prestigious awards, including the Keith Reimer Lecture of the International Society for Heart Research, the Paul Morawitz award of the German Cardiac Society and the William Harvey Lecture of the European Society of Cardiology. He is the 2017 Carl Wiggers awardee of the American Physiological Society. He has published more than 500 original and review articles in peer-reviewed journal, his h-factor is 80. His research focuses on the regulation of coronary blood flow, coronary microembolization, cardioprotection and heart failure.