Jan Schmitto is currently Professor of Cardiac Surgery at the Department of Cardiac, Thoracic, Transplantation and Vascular Surgery at Hannover Medical School, Germany. He is the Director of the Mechanical Circulatory Support (MCS) Program, the Surgical Head of the Interdisciplinary Heart Failure Unit, as well as the Director of the newly implemented Innovation-Division “Active Device Technologies” at Hannover Medical School. After finishing medical school in Munster, Germany and Vienna, Austria, Jan completed his cardio-thoracic residency at University Hospital of Gottingen, Germany as one of the youngest cardio-thoracic surgeons worldwide. He served as a Fellow in the Division of Cardiac Surgery, Brigham and Women´s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA and is presently working as an academic cardio-thoracic surgeon at Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany where he also became the Director of the Mechanical Circulatory Support and Cardiac Transplantation Program. With more than 100 LVAD implantations per year, Jan leads one of the largest VAD programmes worldwide. He is a pioneer in minimall invasive cardiac surgery, having developed and established the minimally invasive HVAD implantation technique, as well as being the worldwide first surgeon to implant the LVAD “HeartMate 3”, and the first surgeon to implant the less invasive HeartAssist5 LVAD.
