Heiko von der Leyen

Heiko Echter von der Leyen, born on 2 June 1955, is a German physician from the von der Leyen family of Hanover, and the son of the physician Ulrich von der Leyen. He studied chemistry at Hamburg in 1975 and 1976, enrolled at Hanover Medical School in 1979 and took his medical doctorate there in 1986. He trained in pharmacology, then in internal medicine and cardiology, and from 1992 to 1996 was a research fellow and faculty member at Stanford University. He gained his habilitation at Hanover in 1998 and became adjunct professor of internal medicine and experimental cardiology in 2002. In 2005 he became director of the Hanover Clinical Trial Center, an academic clinical research organization on the medical school campus, and from December 2020 he was medical director of Orgenesis, a cell and gene therapy company. He is married to Ursula von der Leyen.