Dr. Thorsten Sieß, CTO of Johnson & Johnson MedTech | Heart Recovery, was awarded the Aachen Engineering Prize 2025 in the Coronation Hall of Aachen City Hall.

This moment remains in the memory - and in the hearts: the visitors applauded the new Aachen Engineering Award winner Dr. Thorsten Sieß for several minutes. They stood up and impressively showed their respect, recognition and gratitude for an extraordinary engineer who had written "an incredible story" with "drive and pioneering spirit", as Aachen's Lord Mayor Sibylle Keupen put it. Dr. Thorsten Sieß, an RWTH alumnus, is the developer of the ^Impella® heart pump, the smallest heart pump in the world, and has built up his own company with this idea.

Today, he is Chief Technology Officer of Johnson & Johnson MedTech | Heart Recovery, which builds, sells and develops the ^Impella® heart pump. And it has now been used successfully 400,000 times worldwide to help hearts and patients recover after heart attacks with cardiac shock, among other things. The little lifesaver has her cradle in Aachen. On Saturday evening in the Coronation Hall of Aachen City Hall, Sieß was awarded the Engineering Prize by the City of Aachen and RWTH Aachen University in a festive and varied ceremony. Prior to this, he had spoken to the graduates of the University of Excellence at the university's Graduate Festival in Aachen's Soers and encouraged them to take on new challenges - even if this is not always easy

This was also made clear at the award ceremony for the Aachen Engineering Prize 2025: it was not a straightforward success story embodied by the prizewinner. On the contrary. In his words of thanks, Sieß recalled lean periods and thanked his colleagues and family: "This is not an individual achievement, but a team effort," he said. A pioneering approach needs people like Thorsten Sieß, but ultimately it also needs people who believe in the idea with him and finance it. This has not always been the case in the history of the ^Impella® heart pump and so the prizewinner, like Professor Lutz Eckstein, President of the Association of German Engineers, appealed to the willingness in Germany to invest in innovative ideas in the end. "Engineers work on ideas that make people's lives more pleasant. They work for the benefit of people. The ^Impella® heart pump saves lives every day," emphasized Eckstein in his welcoming address. The vdi has supported the Aachen Engineering Award since 2014 and is responsible for the sculpture of the crossing ellipses that the award winner receives.

The living proof was sitting in row 1: Claire Houben was the first patient to be implanted with an ^Impella® heart pump. A special guest at the award ceremony. And the circle was complete: the laudatory speech was given by her surgeon, Professor Bart Meyns, Medical Head of Cardiac Surgery at UZ Leuven, a man who had always believed in the idea of the small heart pump. "It is an extraordinary experience to accompany a new medical device from its initial conception and development to its actual use in medical practice. And we have had the privilege of making this journey. There are many ups and downs in a story like this. Great emotions and trembling knees with the first patient in Leuven," he said. What an exciting story!

"With the Engineering Award, we want to show our graduates what can be achieved with a career in engineering - with passion and tenacity," explained the Rector of RWTH Aachen University, Professor Ulrich Rüdiger. And the impressive performance of the ^Impella® heart pump was illustrated by chemist Eric Siemes, who used scientific experiments to make the topic of the heart pump tangible. The evening was accompanied by music from Maxim Burtsev.

About the engineering prize

The Aachen Engineering Prize is a joint award of RWTH Aachen University and the City of Aachen - with the kind support of the Association of German Engineers VDI as the prize sponsor. Every year, a personality is honored whose work has made a significant contribution to the positive perception or further development of engineering or science. This is the eleventh time the award has been presented. The first winner was Professor Berthold Leibinger (died 2018), shareholder of TRUMPF GmbH + Co. He was followed by Professor Franz Pischinger, founder of Aachen-based FEV Motorentechnik GmbH, the astronaut Thomas Reiter, the long-standing Director of the Machine Tool Laboratory WZL at RWTH Aachen University, Professor Manfred Weck (died 2024), Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier, microbiologist and co-inventor of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene scissors and now Nobel Prize winner, the entrepreneur Hans Peter Stihl, the technology pioneer Sebastian Thrun, the science journalist Dr. Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, former BASF CTO Dr. Melanie Maas-Brunner and, last year, Airbus CTO Dr. Sabine Klauke.