Safe travels to the U.S. East Coast for your research stay!

With the goal of strengthening individual career paths for researchers at the DHZC while deepening strategic partnerships with internationally leading heart centers such as Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and Mass General Brigham in Boston, the German Heart Center Foundation launched its first international travel fellowship program in spring 2025. The first two fellowship candidates have now been selected

Two candidates selected by an interdisciplinary jury

A distinctive feature of the “International Visiting Fellowship Program” is its inclusiveness: researchers at all career stages—from senior physicians to early-career talents—are eligible to apply. Key selection criteria included scientific achievements appropriate to the applicant’s career level, personal commitment, a well-defined and collaboratively developed project proposal with the U.S. host institution, and the anticipated benefit for research, clinical practice, and organizational development at DHZC. In July 2025, an interdisciplinary jury of representatives from BIH, Charité, DHZC, and the Foundation recommended two projects for funding:

“Network for Heart Transplantation and Advanced Heart Failure” by Prof. Felix Schönrath(Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery)
“Artificial Intelligence in Cardiology: Using Large Language Models for Predictive Modeling of Clinical Data” by Dr. Stefan Hegselmann (Department of Cardiology, Angiology, and Intensive Care Medicine/CCM)

Both projects will be carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Mass General Brigham in the coming year.

Network for Heart Transplantation and Advanced Heart Failure

Felix Schönrath aims to establish a robust research network focused on heart transplantation and advanced heart failure, with the goal of translating innovative procedures—some not yet approved in Germany or not yet established at the DHZC—into clinical practice. A particular focus lies on organ donation after circulatory death (DCD), a procedure with the potential to significantly increase the number of available donor hearts, though still subject to ethical and legal debate in Germany. Additionally, he plans to advance the implementation of cell-free DNA and gene profiling analyses for rejection diagnostics in close collaboration with the Charité’s tissue typing laboratory.

AI in Cardiology: Using Large Language Models for Predictive Modeling of Clinical Data

In collaboration with the teams of Prof. Patrick Ellinor (MGB/Broad Institute) and Prof. Collin M. Stultz(MGB/MIT), Stefan Hegselmann will gain access to extensive, high-quality cardiovascular datasets unavailable in Germany. He will also learn from successful machine learning applications already integrated into cardiovascular research and, in part, clinical workflows in the U.S. This experience will be invaluable as the DHZC continues to expand its digital health infrastructure.

We warmly congratulate Felix Schönrath and Stefan Hegselmann on their exciting research topics and look forward, as the Foundation, to following their journeys in 2026—and to hearing more about the insights and results of their research stays abroad.