Heinrich Schima studied electrical and control engineering at the Vienna University of Technology and wrote his doctoral thesis on the haemodynamics of the isolated small animal heart at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Experimental Traumatology. In 1985, he moved to the then Biotechnical Laboratory of the II Surgical University Clinic Vienna and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cardiac Surgery Research. This laboratory developed into today’s Centre for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at MedUni Vienna.

Schima was responsible for the technical supervision of the first – very successful – clinical use of the artificial heart in Vienna and, together with his working group, immersed himself in the development of rotary blood pumps. The Vienna group was able to make a significant contribution to questions of blood damage and the monitoring of such systems. In 1998, the first fully implantable rotary pumps (a NASA development) were implanted in Vienna, and an algorithm for physiologically adapted control was subsequently developed and clinically validated in Vienna. In 2006, we implanted the world’s first pump with a hydrodynamically floating rotor, to whose further development the Vienna group made a significant contribution. Another research focus was the operating safety of these life-sustaining systems, where questions of usability (the term did not even exist in medicine at the time) were addressed together with patients, relatives and clinical staff. Schima has been a member of the MUW Ethics Committee for 12 years and has been involved in the implementation of MDR in Austrian practice in the interests of maximum patient welfare while at the same time minimising bureaucracy. He was President of the European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAO), the International Federation for Artificial Organs (IFAO), the International Society for Mechanical Cardiac Support (ISMCS), and the Fellows of the European Association of Bioengineers (EAMBES).